


don't wake me, i'm not dreaming

by Geertrui



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bittersweet, Charles is a Troll, Enemies to Lovers, Erik Has Feelings, First Time, Haunting, M/M, Mediums, Repressed Emotions, Sharing Body Heat, Sharing Clothes, Sharing a Bed, Slow Build, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:12:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 55,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4681655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geertrui/pseuds/Geertrui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier have never gotten along, it's a school-wide known fact. But when Charles dies in a wrong-place, wrong-time accident that Erik could have prevented, guilt plagues him for weeks; a guilt on which he pins hallucinations, paranoia, and his mental instability. </p><p>What Erik can't blame on guilt, however, is seeing Charles sitting at his dining table with his legs crossed and his habitual smirk one afternoon, a month after he died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by and dedicated to the wonderful TJ, who pretty much came up with and supported this monster.
> 
> Chapters will be of varying lengths and posted infrequently.

They have nothing in common save for the Advanced English class they share. Even then, Erik wishes he’d substituted the bragging rights of suffering through Ms. Munroe’s gruelling course for having a truly Charles Xavier-free senior education – or in the least, a minimalistic one. Xavier’s the head of the SRC and also school captain, which are titles that do little to increase his popularity within school, let alone their small town. He’s a notorious flirt, an infamous prankster with a daedalian wit, who, in Erik’s opinion, gets away with everything because he rides high up on the coattails of his family’s name and old money; but that’s just Erik’s opinion, and one he sits alone in, like he sits alone at the back of each class, studying hard for his grades while Xavier pulls his from air.

Last period on Fridays are universally wild, but last period on a Friday with Xavier is simply catastrophic, and it’s never changed. A wink and a grin has Munroe forfeiting her usual strict lesson regime and adopting an easy, laidback revision set, which makes Erik grind his teeth because that’s what _study_ and _homework_ are for. With Munroe’s sigh of defeat comes cheers from Xavier’s friends – a coterie which happens to be the _entire class_ \- and the cacophony beats against Erik’s mind and his already waning tolerance. It never takes long for a headache to bloom, knocking against his skull until after dinner, impeding on his study time and ruining his schedule.

The stress Charles Xavier sets in him is inescapable. The fact that Charles is ridiculously attractive only agitates him further, makes it a struggle to truly ignore him and keep his eyes on his notebooks during class, and ruins his sleep cycle to boot.

Half an hour left to the class and Munroe is sitting at her desk, tapping at her keyboard and leaving her seniors to their own devices – literally. Erik presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and rubs them back into focusing. When they do, Erik wishes he’d kept them shut.

There’s the scraping of a chair over linoleum, and then: “Are you going to the party tonight?” Xavier asks him, chin to palm, elbow to table as he sits opposite Erik in a pulled-up seat. Xavier’s eyes are always wide in that innocent, beseeching way that Erik knows is a pretense. It’s a trap he uses to lure people in, flashing them with that obscene shade of blue, persuading them to do his bidding. Erik sets his jaw; Xavier’s charms won’t work on him.

“What party?” he asks flatly.

Charles rolls his eyes and leans forward, grinning like they’re two friends conspiring. Erik leans back.

“Jean’s hosting a party, practically everyone in senior year is coming, how haven’t you heard?”

 _It’s a mystery, what with your loud mouth,_ Erik wants to say. “Just didn’t,” he says instead.

“Oh, well, would you like to come?” Erik raises an eyebrow.

“No, thank you. I have homework.” He says it as politely as he can manage. He usually spits his words when he talks to Charles. This is, so far, civil.

Charles huffs happily, and Erik pretends his stomach doesn’t clench at the way Charles’ eyes squint as he grins. “Couldn’t you take one night off? You wouldn’t have to stay, I was just wondering if you could please give me a lift home?”

 _Why would you ask me for a ride_ , Erik means to say, but it comes out as, “Why would I give you a lift?” He cringes internally.

Charles has this uncanny way of understanding people, what they mean, that puts Erik on-edge and only adds to the unease he gets when Charles is around. He quiets the small part of him that’s glad for it now quickly enough.

“I just thought, it could be a good opportunity for us to catch up, you know? Plus I’ve never seen you at one of the school parties, so I thought you could get out there and have some fun with us.”

It’s considerate in the sickeningly sweet way Charles is, and Erik hates him all the more for it.

“Sorry, I have to study and I work tomorrow; I can’t be out late tonight. You’ll find someone else.”

Erik looks down at his notebook so he doesn’t have to see the dejected nod Charles gives, or the sudden heaviness in his ever-bright eyes. Xavier sits for a moment more, before picking the chair up by the top of its back and returning to his flock of friends. “What were you doing talking to the Shark over there?” one of them asks incredulously. Erik ignores them, like he’s always done, but the guilt that settles in his belly refuses to be treated likewise. 

*

Charles messages him on _Facebook_ a bit past eleven p.m., when Erik’s brushing his teeth and running through formulas in his head for the calculus test next week. His phone vibrates angrily against the porcelain counter, and he pauses mid thrust to look down at his lit up screen.

 _Charles Xavier:_  
_Hey hey you!! i was just wondering of there was any way you could please possibly please give me a lift home??? i can give fuel money, we can get something to eat? Mcdonalds is 24hr right? I’ll treat you! It could be like a date! Haha x  
_ _[23:04]_

Erik stares at the message, reading it over and over until it doesn’t seem like words. He puts his phone down, spits his toothpaste, reads it again, and puts it down. Surely he messaged the wrong person. His phone starts a small trill of pops, and he glances down lightning quick to see Charles typing more – probably an apology. ‘Oh I’m so sorry I meant this for someone else’. As if Charles would message him something like that, Erik barely hides his distaste for his fellow pupil—

 _Charles Xavier:_  
_you have rly rly rly nice arms erik_  
_from carrying all those books?_  
_[23:07]_

 _sometimes I come into the library just to see you_  
_shh pretend I dint say that_  
_[23:09]_

Erik’s mouth goes dry and he locks his screen abruptly. Reflection Erik has hand-tousled hair and a smudge of white paste on his chin, his eyes are wide and disbelieving, and there’s a light blush high up on his cheeks.

He’s drunk, he doesn’t mean what he’s saying, he couldn’t ever-

 _Charles Xavier:_  
_Please please please erik I really need you rn_  
_[23:12]_

No. No matter how drunk Charles is, he can’t mean what he’s saying, and if he does- if he _does_ , he’d be embarrassed by it come morning and all its sobriety. It’d be better for Erik to just ignore the messages and delete the thread, that way he can feign ignorance and pretend he never got them, saving Charles’ dignity, and his own traitorous heart – because there’s no way Charles could feel something for him. Ever. They never got along the few times they were made to work together on projects, always arguing about hypotheses and opinions and theories. Their personalities just- clash. Charles is an ignorant optimist while Erik is a critical analyst. The times they do speak at school, save this afternoon, they’ve always ended up saying something biting or snarky, not to mention Charles never puts his books back correctly at the library. If this is Charles’ confession, and by some crazy, universal power they do get together, it could never last, they’d grow apart, and Erik would just get hurt. He’s got finals at the end of the year, he can’t be distracted; or heartbroken.

Better to just avoid all possible negative outcomes by ignoring Charles and deleting the messages in the morning.

So he puts his phone on silent and crawls into bed. He’s on open at work, and he’s not sure if last night’s page got all the checks done and the books back- probably not, what with his luck, so he’ll have to deal with that tomorrow…

He dreams about Charles, but come morning he doesn’t remember what happened. When Erik wakes fully, he sees he has more messages, but he doesn’t open them. He’s got an hour to get ready for work, no time to waste on people like Xavier.

*

Erik takes his bike to work to keep in touch with his European heritage and also to lighten his carbon footprint. Not to mention gas is expensive, and he’s saving up what he can in case he can’t get a scholarship for the university he wants, which is, admittedly, across the country and far from his parents, but it’s a good one. The backup plan is that he goes back to Germany and studies there, where it’s free; but for now he bikes, and relishes in the quiet tinged with the whir of his bike chain as he rolls down the roads.

The autumn chill settles into his cheeks as Erik wheels up to the library, chaining his bike in place and unwinding his scarf as he steps inside. Armando is branch head  today, and he nods at Erik over his coffee with heavy eyes and uncombed hair.

“Good morning. You alright? You don’t look so well,” Erik notes as he taps his clock-on number into the computer.

“’Morning, I’ve just not had much sleep – Alex was called out late last night, he wasn’t meant to be working but the accident was so bad they needed him. Didn’t come home till six this morning, and when he did he was pretty shaken. Worrying over his brother and all – you know how he gets.”

Erik nods and hums. “Car crash?”

“Yeah, teenage drunk driver shtick – driver and passenger made it through, but second passenger died at the scene. T-boned on the passenger side. Alex didn’t want to talk much about it – he never wants to talk about the ones involving a fatality, which is probably bad for his psyche, especially as a paramedic bottling this kind of stuff up, but hey. He lets me in most of the time.”

In this small town, when someone dies there’s always someone who knows Erik who knew the person. Erik leaves Armando to his much-needed coffee and starts piling returns from the dropbox onto his cart, but the chill from outside still hasn’t left him, even when the clock ticks into halfway through his shift. A few students have trickled in and sit at the desks in the teen corner, pulling out tomes for studying with heavy bags under their tired eyes. Erik nods to Hank, whom he recognizes from the year below himself, but his eyes fall to the empty spot next to him that Charles has always occupied. He swallows when he remembers what Charles had said last night – _sometimes I come into the library just to see you_ – and grits his teeth, because he forgot to delete the messages that the idiot had sent him. He’ll do it on his break – Charles is probably still comatose in his hangover, he’s got time – and in the meantime he tries to keep his mind off the empty seat and the ever-present chill in his gut.

*

He ends up skipping out on a break. Armando had to head home to take care of his restless partner, and so Erik runs shift until Angel comes on for the evening, clutching a packet of ibuprofen and the remnants of her hangover. She waves at him in lieu of words, settling into the plush swivel chair Armando had splurged on with wild eyes, behind the front desk and digging her palms into her eyes.

“Surely you didn’t drink that much,” Erik chides as he pulls his coat on. Angel whines.

“No, but the traffic is terrible, there was a crash or something. Spent for-fucking-ever on the highway, it was messed up what happened. Be grateful for your bicycle and your proximity to town; ride safely, always indicate, and wear a helmet, young man.”

Erik huffs in good nature and waves her off as he steps out into the afternoon chill, pulling on his gloves with his teeth. His phone vibrates in his pocket as he sets off, but it’s probably just Xavier, now sober with a lot of apologies and a little less dignity – not that Erik ever thought of him as having much. The sky is a dark mess of greys, and town is unsettlingly calm, even for this late in the afternoon on a Saturday.

When he pulls up at home the chill in his gut has climbed each rung of his spine and settled in his neck, bringing with it a need to look over his shoulder every so often, but he sees no one following him. Retrospectively, he should have known something was wrong when he saw his mother standing by the door wringing the skirt of her dress, waiting for him to hang his coat before enveloping him in her arms and sobbing, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over again; an apology for the loss, an apology for being grateful that it’s her son who is still alive.

He walks down the hall into the living room and it takes a century. The walls and the floorboards and the photographs all lose their colour and bleed into a swathe of insipid grey, Erik’s surroundings becoming indistinguishable from one another because they _just don’t matter_. Edie is talking to him between sobs, but she becomes white noise to the television, which fills the room and Erik’s head with a grave, monotonous drawl.   

When Erik sees the bulletin on the news, he doesn’t believe it. It’s Charles’ face, with wild eyes and light cheeks and a grinning mouth in his senior photo, hair glossy and curling around his head. His blouse is buttoned, his tie is tight, and there’s not a smudge of lint on his blazer. It’s the exact same one Erik has in his yearbook; only this one, this version, has a banner run along the bottom that blazes in capitals at him -

_‘ **XAVIER HEIR DIES IN DRUNK DRIVING INCIDENT** ’_

* * *

 


	2. Chapter 2

Erik’s still in denial – even after the school memorial ceremony is held in the hall on Monday, and a plaque set on the wall (concluded with urgent ushers from the headmasters that any student needing help coping with the tragedy can seek out the school therapist, and then they list external agencies that Erik pointedly ignores).

He only scrapes by in the calculus test on Tuesday, because he can’t stop thinking about the empty seat in the class over.

When the driver – Erik doesn’t even know who he is, doesn’t care – comes back to school on Wednesday, Erik seeks him out and punches him square in the jaw, over and over again, and he doesn’t even know why; he didn’t even like Xavier. He was stuck-up and stupidly optimistic with no real idea of the world; but he was generous and kind and had an enviable cleverness, and by the time Erik is pulled away all he has is bloody knuckles and lost breath and a three-day suspension.

Armando keeps him in the rumour mill via Alex’s brother Scott who is in the year below Erik. At work on Thursday, Armando tells him how all the school is talking about what Erik did, and for one panicking moment Erik thinks he’s talking about the ignored messages that are still unopened in his inbox – but then he realises his manager is talking about how he beat the driver into a bloody, snotty mess. “Scott wanted to do the same, for Jean’s sake. I think he’ll hurry up and ask her out now, but then again, she might not be so stable for that after having her best friend die right next to her.”

Erik doesn’t answer.

That night, when the illustrious Xavier family makes time in their mourning for an exclusive interview regarding the accident, Erik turns off the television set with trembling fingers. If he’d have picked Charles up from the party, Sharon Xavier’s only son would be alive and maybe her notoriety for the drink wouldn’t turn into notoriety for the entire bottle, the casket, the wine bladder.

On Friday Erik cracks, buying cheap cigarettes and biking down to the cemetery and glaring at the fresh dirt smothering Xavier as he chain-smokes the packet away, sat at the end of the plot and reading the epitaph on the glossy marble headstone over and over. Flowers tumble from bouquets strewn around the grave, water-ruined notes from friends tied to stems crumpled and wasting.

He sits until carmine-tinted purple begins to streak across the sky, illuminating a handful of stars and bringing with it a handful of Xavier’s plethora of friends. Of course they’d have come; it’s the week anniversary, he should have known they’d show up. He doesn’t slink away fast enough, though, and they call out to him as he bikes away, but he ignores them, just like he ignored Charles, still ignores him after he’s dead and six feet underground.

At the library, when some kid from the neighbouring high school unknowingly sits in Charles’ chair, Armando has to spend ten minutes trying to explain why the student _can_ actually sit there, despite whatever his coworker has said, and then spends another ten placating Erik where he stands with ragged breaths and white knuckles between the shelves. He feels a hand on his shoulder, but when he looks behind him his manager is shaking his head and already back at the front desk.   

At home there’s a constant coldness at the top of his spine and low in his belly, and Edie has to coax him out of bed most days. School goes too quickly for his liking, days and nights tumbling over into passing time that really doesn’t heal his wounds – nor that of anyone else in his grade, he realises on the days he manages to bike further than the cemetery. He never enters the grounds anymore, just sits on the fringes until the evening, lax on his bike seat with heavy lungs.

The anger never leaves anymore, either. He didn’t even _like_ Charles, and that makes him angrier, makes him feel guiltier, because if _he_ hadn’t been so stuck up and judgmental, if he’d just fucking picked him up and dealt with the drunk talk, Charles would be there in English, would be sat on stage during assembly with a smart uniform and a handsome smile, would be debating him on every single subject possible during class, and would regard him with those cheeky comments remedied with a flourish of kindness, just like he’d done before.

On one afternoon spent at the cemetery he dozes, and when he wakes it’s with Charles’ fingers in his hair pushing sweaty tresses back into place and whispering with the freezing wind, “ _You need to go home, your mother is worrying._ ”

The wind whips his face flushed as he bikes as fast as his shaking legs will push him, but he can still feel the phantom sensation of Charles’ hand on his cheek, and when he closes his eyes he still sees that piercing electric blue filled with worry, and not a touch of opaque, blind cloud. 

*

Three weeks after the accident, Erik finally opens the messages that Charles sent the night he died.

 _Charles Xavier:_  
_I know you can see these erik.  
_ _[23:16]_

 _im sorry I just want to go home  
_ _[23:20]_

 _we don’t get along well but youre the most decent person I know  
_ _[23:24]_

 _I feel sick please help  
_ _[23:40]_

 _whatever. Don’t worry then. Im getting a ride with someone here._  
_Thanks anyway  
_ _[23:56]_

   
Erik knows deleting the thread will cause him the least pain, but some selfish part of him won’t do it, can’t do it; he reads the messages over and over until he falls asleep with the phone in his hand and reading glasses pressing welts into his temple.

*

At some point in the night Erik wakes, tasting copper on the roof of his dry mouth, squinting as flashes of lightning fill the room. He’d definitely shut his curtains before he went to bed.

The floorboards are cold and creaking beneath his feet as he pads over to pull his blinds shut. The room is cast into an unnaturally dark black, all light drowned out and leaving him disoriented, hands out in front of him grappling for any furniture to brace himself on. He makes it to his bedside table without incident, however when he tries to turn the lamp on it gives its habitual click but no light. He tries to swallow the tightness in his throat but it doesn’t shift. The globe must be blown, that’s all, he’ll deal with that in the morning.

The walk down the hall to the kitchen is cold and dark, roof rattling with the pelting rain and thunder bouncing off wall and floor in rumbling echoes. Erik tells himself that it’s impossible for there to be something breathing on his neck – his mother is too short, his father is too tall, there’s no one else in the house, there’s no one else in this house – and when he makes it to the kitchen it takes him three attempts to flick the lights on with his shaking hands.

Everything is normal – the runner on the table is as neat as it was last night at dinner, the chairs are tucked in, the dishes are drying on the rack. The ringing in Erik’s ears is only interrupted by the thrum of his pulse in his neck and the breaths he’s trying to regulate. Over his shoulder, there’s no one, just a hallway speared with yellow light from the kitchen, cutting the bookcase and streaking on the photo frames. Everything is normal. Everything is okay--

\--But then it isn’t, and there’s something in the reflection on the glasses in the cupboard that catches in the corner of his eye, moving too quick to be processed but not quick enough to avoid being noticed. Goosebumps prickle his skin, like cold fingers being dragged over his arms and leaving raised hairs in their wake.  Nothing-- it was nothing, he’s just seeing things, disorientated in the twilight hours of-- actually, he’s not even sure what time it is, but he has no way of knowing because when Erik turns to look at the clock on the wall by the door, the face has melted into a grotesque, ambiguous blob of black slick tendrils, dripping down the wall thickly. A shadow that couldn’t possibly be his own breaks the neat triangle the light makes into the hallway and Erik’s throat tightens, hands scrambling for the tap. Dehydration, it couldn’t be dehydration but _it_ _has to be_ , there’s no other way to _explain_ this and—

A torrent of dark blood gushes from the mouth of the tap, filling the sink and ricocheting against the steel, splashing against Erik’s thin shirt and his jaw. The glass shatters on the floor. Panic slides down his throat like black oil, choking him and seeping into his bones, veins, pores like resin, molding him still and staring at the sink, because he doesn’t know what he’ll do if he looks at the hallway again and sees the shadow isn’t there anymore – Erik doesn’t know what he _can_ do, because even trying to tell if his screaming is internal or external is proving to be a real struggle on par with moving his arms, or any part of him, which is all completely petrified and drowning in panic.

The blood steadily fills the sink, too thick to pass into the drain quick enough and blotted with dark brown clots, and the dank, metallic smell nearly overpowers him, eyes watering. Sweat is rolling down his neck and drenching his shirt, and his rasping pants come from between panic-tight grit teeth. His heart’s so fast he’s worried he might pass out. His white-knuckle grip on the edge of the sink is stippled with drops of the blood, and when it starts to sluice over onto the tiles in thick rivulets Erik spits a curse, slams the tap off, and counts back from five- breath slowly, count the tiles on the wall, count the plates in the rack.

He doesn’t get very far before the kitchen exhaust fan starts to whirl faster than normal, and the microwave revs up to an unnaturally loud whine that splits into Erik’s head, and he shouts, leaning over and grabbing his hair with bloody hands. When he opens his eyes from the painful scrunch he’d succumbed to he finds he was right – the shadow has moved from the hallway. Erik can feel himself beginning to hyperventilate, but there’s no way he can calm himself back from this.

The piercing cacophony of the kitchen is punctuated by the smashing of the plates, and bent at the hip, Erik only sees the way the porcelain skitters across the floor, like beads of oil in a hot pan. This has to be a messed up dream – it _has_ to be. Slowly, so slowly his back aches, Erik forces himself to look up in front of him to the dish rack. He’s not sure what he expects to see- some shadowy hand curling around each vessel before throwing it at its feet, or maybe a grotesquely disfigured one with rot and pus and gaping sores – but to his surprise there’s nothing there, just the empty space between him and counter; until, after the plates have been exhausted, a glass levitates briefly before coming crashing down and lying in chunks around the floor.

Those were his mother’s plates, his mother’s cups, his family’s kitchen and his house; before Erik can catch himself he screams, “Enough!” and the screeching of the fans and the wailing of the microwave end instantaneously. The raised glass floats slowly down into the rack, settling with a clink against its neighbor.

 _Enough_? Something whispers into his head, happily, curiously confused. The shadow is back, stretched up over the wall in front of Erik, floorboards creaking as it moves, and something cool is touching his mouth, his cheek, and then his eyes. The world slowly tilts sideways as the cold fingers slide his eyelids shut and trace the bones in his face, and when Erik hits the floor the only thing he can register before he falls unconscious is the phantom sliding into his mind again: _enough_.

 *

Erik wakes with a crazy headache at seven am, phone chirping next to him on the side table with his morning alarm.  The sun peeks and pokes its way around the corners of his drapes, and Erik squints, because there’s no way it could be this sunny with the weather the way it was last night-

Which reminds him.

Last night.

He sits up so quick his head spins, but it’s not hard for Erik to distinguish his surroundings. He’s in his room, somehow  under the covers on his bed. He’d been collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor last he remembered. A cursory glance around the room; glasses and phone on the table; blinds shut, door pulled, desk neat as it was last night. Erik glares at the lamp for a good solid minute, and reaches out three times before he cusses himself and his hesitation and flicks the light on.

The room isn’t dark, but the lamp is definitely, indisputably on and working in a pointless competition with the sun to cast light around the place.

He flicks it on and off a few more times, for good measure, and swallows something thick in his throat.

Heavy bags weigh down the skin under his eyes when he looks at himself in the mirror, which he tries to avoid looking in at all, afraid of what he’ll see in the reflection. Erik tries not to think on the idea of something being in the room with him as he dresses for work.

It takes him nearly ten minutes to walk downstairs, but no matter how many times he walks into the bathroom to brush his hair aimlessly, there’s no escaping going to the kitchen when his father calls him down.

The floorboards don’t creak because Erik knows where to step, and he walks as slowly as his stalling will allow. Adrenaline pumps through him, leaving his mind alert and fresh and all too fearful of what he might see in the kitchen – blood gushing on the floor and licking up the walls and drowning him in thick sheets; the melting numbers on the clock face running down the wall, the digital green stick-lights on the microwave sliding down the grey keypad, God forbid blood or guts _in_ the microwave-

But as he steps into the doorway, all Erik sees is his dad, standing at the stove top and smiling at him, humming over the eggs sizzling in the pan. No ocean of blood or even stains in the grout between the tiles. Clock ticking away and reading seven forty-eight in solid, heavy blocks of Roman numerals. Dishes leaning neatly in their slots, clean and very much whole. Runner on the table handsome and straight.

No third-shadow lurking in places the light couldn’t possibly cast it. Nothing shimmering in the glasses in the cupboard.

“Are you alright? You don’t look so hot,” his dad says with a careful smile. He knows about Charles – everyone this side of the universe knows about Charles Xavier – but he doesn’t know about the messages and Erik hopes that no one ever will.

Erik wets his lips and braces himself subtly on the back of the chair. “You didn’t- uh. You didn’t hear anything last night?”

“Like what?”

“Like, uh-“ Erik licks his lips again and ignores the faucet, but he can’t help his eyes from darting between his Dad and the cupboard, and he can see the glass he went for last night, still tucked neatly next to its siblings. “Yelling, or… Something? I thought I heard yelling.”

With a pinch along his brow, his dad shakes his head. “No, nope. I didn’t hear anything, and you know your mother would have woken me if she had. The neighbours?”

Swallowing has been really, really hard for Erik lately. “Yeah, it must have been them,” he concedes, sitting at the table and glaring at the candelabra they hardly use because it spills wax all over the runner.

A wobbly plate of eggs and toast and tomatoes slides into his gaze, and his dad beams at him. It’s the same smile he’s shone at him every morning for the past three weeks, and Erik knows he has to get his shit together and stop staring off in the distance, because soon he knows pamphlets for teen’s health clinics are going to mysteriously wind their way under the Polish flag magnet on the refrigerator. The phone number for the Kid’s Help Line will sneak its way into the landline’s memory bank next. After that, his mother will take initiative and Erik’s not sure how that will go down. He just isn’t sure.

With his Saturday shift starting at nine, Erik takes his time with his breakfast and flicks through things on his phone as he does. Charles’ _facebook_ hasn’t been deactivated, he notices via the _wallpost_ memoriam one of his many friends has made this morning. Erik wishes it would be, finds it somewhat inappropriate for people to keep posting stuff Charles will never read or acknowledge. He knows that it’s for coping, knows that he’s just envious he can’t bring himself to cope like that, because he doesn’t have the right. He’s just as at fault as the drunk driver who’d offered to take Charles home. The guilt makes his food bland in his mouth.

*

Erik cruises through the first half of his shift with no incidents, emptying the dropbox with all the skill and finesse of a professional Page being paid twelve dollars an hour and righting the books on the display table. It’s Pride soon, and every queer book Armando had scoured the shelves to find had been dumped onto two trolleys and wheeled over to him days ago. “This is you,” his manager had told him. “Make it fabulous.” Now they sit in artistic spiraling heaps on a rainbow flag being used as a tablecloth. The depressed yucca next to the table is draped with rainbow streamers. “I’m sorry,” Erik tells it. Its spindly trunk seems to sag a little.

It’s as he’s wrapping tomes for the ‘Blind Date With a Book’ table that he notices Hank sitting far across in the study area, occupying his customary seat, but watching him with keen eyes and a furrowed brow. Erik gives him a wary smile and a nod and tries to ignore him as he continues wrapping, but every few minutes when he gives a cursory glance up to check that everything is in order, the kid is still staring at him blankly. It’s starting to be on-par with the melting clock face from last night on the creepiness scale – which is also something Erik is happy to ignore, or pass off as some really freaky, vivid dream.

Ten minutes later, Hank sidles up to him and frightens him enough to reinforce the headache he woke up with. “Hi, Erik,” he says gently. Erik grits his teeth.

“Hello Hank. Can I help you with anything?” Erik replies tartly once he’s got his breathing under control. He _can_ be genuinely polite, just not when his heartbeat feels like it’s in his temples and the synapses in his brain are being pulled tight as violin strings.

Hank looks around quickly, like he’s snapped out of a daze. “No, I- I was just wondering something, is all.” He finds the ‘ _if you love romance, go on a date with me! : )_ ’ tag Erik’s about to fix to a wrapped book very interesting.

“Shoot.”

“You didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?” Hank blurts, and suddenly everything feels cold and Erik hopes Hank can’t see his fingers trembling around a ribbon.

“No, I did,” he lies. Hank flicks his eyes up through heavy prescriptions and corrects himself.

“You slept well, until you woke up in the middle of the night.”

Erik sucks his gums and isn’t sure which course of action to take; blatantly lie, tell this kid he hardly knows how his kitchen nearly flooded with blood last night, or pretend he has something better to do. Something in Hank’s gaze is gentle and imploring though, knowing; like a teacher trying to coax an answer he already knows from a shy child. If it’ll make Hank go away and stop staring at him, Erik will oblige.

And so quietly, with wide eyes and sweat on his neck, he asks, “How did you know that?”

Suddenly rumpled and harried looking Hank shrugs his shoulders, breaking eye contact to look around the library with a frown.  “I’m not actually too sure? It just- I just felt like I had to come over and say that?”

“…Right.” Erik looks the kid up and down, feeling frumpled and a little embarrassed that he got so sucked in so quickly. “I have to get back to work, so…”

“Oh, yeah, of course. Sorry.”

There’s a cloudiness in his eyes that clears as he shakes his head, trudging back to the desk littered with study notes. Erik watches him a while with tight lips, ‘til he hears Armando cough slightly from the head desk.

Erik slips the cards between the ribbon around the wrapped books in tidy squares – ‘ _have a laugh with me if you enjoy comedy_ ’, ‘ _crack my case if mystery enthrals you_ ’. It’s terribly cheesy, and Erik hates to admit that he has to think this shit up but if he wants to keep earning on average twenty-cents a minute, well; at least he can pretend he isn’t the one to write it, and if Angel ever asks, it was Armando. Believable, what with his antics.

This morning’s headache, the one that Hank had resurfaced, settles low at the back of his skull, and Erik rubs his neck something fierce but the tension isn’t alleviated. If anything his blood thrums angrier, harder, and makes him grind his teeth and scrunch his eyes, as if his head is annoyed he try and find some small relief.

When he opens his eyes, the words on the tag in front of him have melted into the tablecloth, black ink blooming across the white material and creeping along each stitch and string of cotton.

No, _no_ , this can’t be happening here, not _here_ , not now, there’s _too much ink_ , everything is going black; there’s coppery blood welling up in his throat and dribbling through his teeth over his chin, the ceiling light is burning too brightly, whiting out everything around him and blanching it into obscurity; the heating is whirring too loudly, white background noise to the blood drumming in his ears and the ringing in his head-

And then it stops. No blood running down the skin of his throat in rivulets, no ink stains, the heating clicks away quietly. The only evidence that Erik’s world was turning inside out for a few brief seconds is that now his hands are shaking something chronic and sweat is sticking his polo to his back.

Erik looks around. Armando is scanning books out with a smile. Sean is pretending to be working but he’s just sitting at the _Play Station_ in the teen’s section, as per usual. Hank is staring at him again.

The headache is louder than ever. When Erik finishes wrapping and tagging the books, he walks back to his trolley, and finds all the books he’d put back this morning in a haphazard pile in front of him.

Erik doesn’t know what’s happening, but he thinks he’ll go insane if he doesn’t find out soon. 

*

The chain on Erik’s bike rattles and creaks before falling into a heap on the footpath by his tyre, just as he’s wheeling out of the library’s carpark. Oil slicks all over his fingers as he tries to mend it, and grease spits in a small stream onto his pale-blue polo.

His father’s going to be pissed.

(In the way that adults are quietly pissed at teenagers who’ve experienced great loss and are now on the brink because of it; they’re considered like a crack in glass – one wrong move, one stern word, and they’ll shatter and scatter and cut everything around them.)

He’ll just soak it and if Armando gets frumpy about the stain he can order him a sweater-vest to go over, or a wool jumper with the library’s insignia on it. Even though it’s autumn, Erik’s constantly cold nowadays. Maybe he’ll ask for one anyway.

By the time he gets home late in the evening, bike chain looped in the basket and wheels clacking irritably as he walks it, his mother looks about to cry with worry, soothing his hair and holding him tight when he steps into the hall. His father takes his bike around the back to his shed where he’ll fix it up. Edie ushers him into the kitchen and sits him down, hurrying around the kitchen, ladling _matzoh_ balls with their broth into a bowl and settling it down timidly in front of him. Erik wants to tell her not to worry, that he’s okay – he was only late because of the bike falling apart, he wasn’t at the cemetery this time – but when he looks at the tap, the clock, behind him into the hallway, his mouth sticks shut with anxiety. Is he okay? It might have been a lie, anyway.

 *

Sleep is elusive and Erik doesn’t have to wonder why, but when he finally does fall unconscious its with sun peeking around his curtains. In the short while before his alarm buzzes gently on the nightstand he doesn’t stir to more hallucinations; doesn’t dream of gushing blood or oozing black or the world melting around him. He’s had an okay night – that is, until he steps out of bed and bangs his hip against the desk.

He grits his teeth against the pain lighting its way along his skin, trying very, very hard not to curse too loudly. He stumbles forward and nearly crashes into the floor when he goes to lean on the chair – finding that it’s out of its normal place, too. In fact, everything’s been moved, just slightly – a little to the left, and his muscle memory is having a meltdown at this discovery.

And Erik notices that it’s _everything_ – his cupboard, his desk, his chair, his bin. Even, somehow, his bed, and Erik doesn’t think he can explain that to himself. At least the rest of the house has been spared, he finds. 

*

At work, the dropbox is brimming with heavy books – ones that Erik didn’t even know were in the system let alone still got checked out. And they hadn’t; when he scans the first one the check-in date was in 2002. If this Sean’s idea of a joke, Erik’s going to clear the save-file Sean secretly has on the Play Station. It’s under the name _Banshee_. Everyone but Armando knows, but by the time Erik’s through with the books that could change.

When he wheels his cumbersome trolley to the shelves, he finds that the entirety of History, Geography and Biography has been turned spine-in, only the whites of the pages displaying on every branch of the section.

Erik tries not to have a conniption.

*

On Sundays, Erik’s parents mosey on down the road to the Goldbergs for dinner, and Erik uses the time home alone to clean and study and lie on the lounge room floor in his underwear staring at the ceiling. It’s not that he doesn’t like the Goldbergs, it’s just that they have a daughter a little older than Erik whom they’ve been trying to pair with him for years now. What they don’t know is that when Freida was still in high school with Erik he caught her kissing a member of the girl’s soccer team. Erik doesn’t visit anymore, for both their sakes.

After his shower, Erik saunters into the kitchen in his boxers and a singlet, pondering whether dinner tonight will be microwave mac-and-cheese or a stick of garlic bread, or maybe _both_. When he opens the pantry door he blinks. And blinks again. And stares a little more at the shelves until he shuts the door and stares at the floor instead.

It’s all upside-down. The boxes of cereal, tins of soup, pot of _appelstroop_ , and packet of _peppernotten_ , all of it. He opens the draw holding bowls and plates and slams it shut again after a glance. The cupboard above the counter with the cups and mugs is treated similarly. He doesn’t even want to look at the fridge.

The contents of Erik’s entire fucking _kitchen_ are upside-down.

He feels a headache birthing behind his eyes and a scream of frustration crawling up his throat.

 *

Whatever happens at school, Erik’s ready for it – be it the writing in his school books turning back-to-front, his locker holding the entirety of Lake Ontario in it, anything; because he reasons this must all be in his head, and there’s not quite much the human mind can’t imagine.

It all has to be some guilt-induced meltdown, a bout of anxiety where he sees things he shouldn’t and is constantly psychosomatically sore and cold. He needs to do something about the messages, do something to get over the guilt and Charles’ death. He _needs_ to, because there’s no way anyone but himself could have set the kitchen up like it was yesterday evening. Maybe he is the one doing all this stuff, not Sean, not his dad. He’s disorganizing books and disorganizing kitchens like some part of him thinks that if he makes life a struggle for himself it’ll be penance for Charles. Or something. Erik’s starting to freak himself even thinking these excuses up, and mulling them over like they actually have validity and merit, but he pushes that to the back of his mind and tries to focus on the disgustingly large slab of a paragraph in Tacitus’ _Th_ _e Annals of Imperial Rome_ he’s meant to be reading in class.

Nothing strange happens up until lunch, when across the courtyard he sees some guy trip on seemingly empty air, but Erik disregards that from where he’s sat reading on his bench. There’s no way he could’ve done that – it’s a natural occurrence, nothing to get himself worked up over. Nothing.

After lunch, in his mathematics class, Erik sits staring at the equation for five minutes like his solid gaze will make it tremble and relent and answer itself for him. It doesn’t, but Erik feels something cool brush against his ear, and there’s a sharp clarity in his mind, one he’s never felt before and one that tells him the answer like he knew it all along. Something presses on his right shoulder encouragingly but he doesn’t want to think about that, because Erik knows there’s no one there.

For the rest of the day there’s a figure that sits in his peripherals, and Erik constantly gnaws on his lower lip to keep from screaming. He never turns his head more than he has to, in order to see who – or what – is lurking behind him, especially not here in public, because if he has a breakdown in the middle of French it surely wouldn’t end well. The strain of keeping his eyes looking anywhere other than forward brings one of the regular headaches that he’s used to now. His liver is probably twisting in his gut at the prospect of more painkillers sliding into it for processing. This one doesn’t shift with the passing of time though, and Erik sits dizzy on his bike on the way home, trying hard not to crash onto the street or topple onto the pavement and lie there with only the pounding against his skull for company. 

When Erik pulls up at home he casts his bike onto its side inside the front gate, tripping up the porch and slamming against the front door. Slotting the keys into the lock is a struggle he nearly gives up upon, because he feels like he’s going to throw up at any moment. It’s the type of pain that can only be slept off, but even then, the agony is so welded to his synapses Erik’s not sure if he’d be free of it if he slept for ten years.

Compared to all the other headaches, this one makes Erik nauseous and his knees weak – a migraine, it’s developed into a fucking _migraine_ – and he stumbles into the kitchen, grappling the top cupboards for the one above the stove where the medicinals are kept. His fingers fumble with the packet, finally managing to pop two tablets from their seals. He can’t bother with water, everything is hurting too much, and he slides down to the floor with his eyes screwed shut and sweat on his upper lip. The tiles are cool under his flat palms, and the ibuprofen takes a while to kick in, but when it does, Erik can finally manage to open his eyes without feeling like the sun is seeping through his retinas and frying his brain from the inside.

His vision clears slowly but surely. Sitting opposite him at the table with fingers folded neatly and a clever smile perking his lips is Charles Xavier. “Lavender oil is good for headaches, did you know?” he says.

Erik starts screaming.

* * *

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so so much to everyone for reading this! I hope it's living up to expectations aha :)

Edie is the first to burst into the kitchen, towel wrapped around her tightly with hair falling in wet floops around her neck, and her husband isn’t far behind. Erik can see their mouths moving, but nothing breaks through the ringing in his ears.

Erik points with a shaking arm at Charles Xavier, and Charles Xavier smiles at him gently. Edie looks between Erik and the table with a heavy frown.

“You’re the only one who can see me, Erik. You need to calm your mind or your parents are going to freak out even more.”

Some small part of Erik knows it’s true and works quickly to shut down the hysteria climbing up his throat. He tucks his arm tight to his chest and forces himself to breathe slowly, count to five, stop clawing at the cupboard behind him with his other hand. This is just a hallucination, it _has to be_ -

“Say you’re just feeling sick, and you need to lie down. I’ll meet you in your room,” Xavier instructs before he stands, tucking the chair in with a _very audible scrape_ (how can his parents not _hear_ it?!) and turning into the hall, brushing past Erik’s parents.  

Erik can feel the post-panic sobs bubbling in his throat, and tries to spit through them that he’s going to his room.

If his mother wasn’t going to coerce him into counselling before, she certainly is now.

He knows his parents are watching him as he shuffles into the hall and climbs the stairs with leaden legs, but he can’t bring himself to care. Maybe he _is_ going insane, and maybe there is only one way to end it, because he doubts talking through his problems is going to stop all this.

 _Don’t be ridiculous_ , Xavier’s voice snaps in his head. _You’re seriously thinking of suicide? Around me?_

Erik whines and grips the bannister before his legs can fall out underneath him.

He stalls going into his room for as long as he can, but then he hears the floorboards creaking at the foot of the stairs and knows his parents are watching him standing there like a fool, and he has to go in if he wants to avoid immediate psychiatric intervention.

Charles is sitting at his desk with a smile, and Erik sucks a breath through his teeth and closes the door with a click.

A million thoughts like buzzards swarm in Erik’s mind, and so there’s no room for eloquence laced in the words that end up falling out of his mouth: “You’re dead.”

Charles sighs and sags a little, and for the short moment he gives Erik before he speaks, Erik thinks that maybe it was all a mistake – maybe Charles Xavier wasn’t killed when the car he was in ran a red-light; maybe he wasn’t paralysed and then crushed under the weight of the car door pushed in by the bull-barred snout of a _Toyota Hilux_ that couldn’t stop fast enough; maybe he wasn’t found with shards of glass digging into his neck and face, with a hematoma spilling into his right eye and blood spilling down split lips and crusting in the neck of his sweater.

But then Charles speaks, and Erik’s hopes are smashed like a pick-up going too fast at an intersection.

“No, you were right, I am definitely dead,” Charles starts with a huff. “Please try to calm down, or you’re going to hyperventilate.”

Dead. Charles Xavier is dead and in his room, and he knows he needs to calm down, needs to get it together, but sliding down the back of his door and falling into a heap feels like a _really nice place_ to be at this moment. Open-mouthed pants rasp through his dry lips from his dry throat, and he’s stuck in a purgatory where he needs to shut his eyes but he can’t look away from the dead person on his computer chair.

Charles frowns at him after a few minutes of watching Erik panicking on the floor. “You’re really not taking this quite well at all, are you?” When he stands up and starts walking towards him, Erik whines loudly and presses his face into the door. “Maybe the blood was a bit too much, but I mean, I am new to this so how could I know?”

Charles settles on his rear in front of Erik and crosses his legs. He reaches out tentatively, like he’s trying to soothe a cat with its hackles up, and his fingers are like ice on Erik’s cheek; but the cold seeps down into his bones and breaks the fevered panic he’s in. “You’re okay, Erik. No more visions.”

The adrenaline that chased his blood through his veins slows and settles, and Charles smiles at him happily and presses his hands around Erik’s face. “See, you’re okay. You’re fine.”

He’s not sure if this is real or a hallucination or in his head, but this is the one chance he has, and the post-panic rush of unused adrenaline is too overwhelming. “I’m sorry,” Erik blurts, eyes stinging and voice breaking. “I’m so sorry, Charles.”

“For what?” the dead boy laughs, tilting his head, and his hair flops with it, chestnut curls and waves drooping in the way that Erik always silently found endearing when Charles was alive.

“For killing you.”

Charles’ smile droops along with his hair. “You didn’t kill me, Erik. Bobby did.”

Erik can’t help that he’s starting to cry and his words are bleeding together. “I should have picked you up, I should have driven you home, Charles; if I came, and got you from that party, you wouldn’t-“

“Stop, Erik. It’s okay. I forgive you.” Charles’ voice is gentle, like his hands, and his fingers card through Erik’s damp hair.

“How can you forgive me? I’m the reason you’re dead.”

“Because I’m a ghost, Erik, and what business does a ghost have holding onto anger. Especially anger I no longer have, because, well…” Charles trails off and can’t make eye contact, staring hardly at the scratches and grooves and whorls in the floorboards. “I exhausted it, I guess you could say.”

Erik glares at him with red-rimmed eyes and a sudden, inexplicable clarity. “What do you mean by ‘exhausted it’?”

Charles chuckles, edging away and peaking at Erik from behind his fringe. “Well, an angry ghost is an active ghost, I’ve learnt, from my, ah, experience. We can’t help it, it’s just an inherent need to cause upheaval. And for a while there I was pretty angry, about everything- and I mean, at the end there you have to admit it got pretty funny, like how I rearranged the kitchen, and moving the things in the house two inches to the left- I have a lot of time to do things now, and no one could see me, so-“

“You fucker,” Erik spits, dragging his legs beneath him and standing. Charles looks up and scrambles to stand, but he could never meet his height when he was alive and there’s no way he’s even breaching into competition now. “It was all you, it’s been you all this time; you’ve been haunting me.”

While Charles is trying to explain in a light, frantic voice that he wasn’t _haunting_ Erik, per se, just seeing how far his powers stretched and what he could do in his new form, Erik pulls his fist back and socks him square in the jaw. His fist is just starting to process the sting when Charles whirls around with wild eyes and punches him so hard he falls back into the door.

*

“All of it, it was all you, haunting me?!”

“It wasn’t _really_ haunting, Erik, I was trying to communicate and well, I was pretty ticked off about the dying thing-”

“You just said you’d forgiven me for that!”

“I didn’t say it was your fault, Erik!”

“So, your practice was turning my kitchen faucet into a fucking _aorta_ and making me think I’d gone insane-!”

“Oh, which is _absolutely_ comparable to ignoring me and killing me as you say you did-”

“Erik, are you alright?”

Dark bruises are blossoming high up on Erik’s left cheekbone, and he has Charles pinned beneath him on the hard floor, both of them panting something fierce, and even though Charles is dead his glare is harder than it ever was when he was alive. Though Erik got in more punches, no bruises or marks or red blotches of exertion swell under Charles’ dead skin, and Erik would feel pretty put out about it if he wasn’t freaking out about his mother calling to him from the other side of the door.

Charles smirks. “They can’t see me, and so they can’t hear me either. But they can hear you, yelling to yourself.”

“Be quiet,” Erik hisses, pushing down on Charles’ shoulders. He clears his throat; “Yeah, sorry, Mom. I’m okay. I was just- just talking to myself.” Charles cocks an eyebrow.

When his mother’s footsteps dwindle down the stairs after one tense, quiet moment, Erik sighs and rolls off of Charles’ legs. At least his headache is gone now, but he still rubs his nose and temples, wary of the tender sides of his face.

Charles sits up and watches him expressionlessly. “I’m sorry for haunting you like I did, I probably shouldn’t have gotten so… intense. As I said, a lot of it wasn’t me consciously. At the start, I had no idea how to make contact, what my powers were, what I could do. I was… experimenting, I guess.”

Erik scoffs and stares out the window. Finding out he’s been haunted for the past month – great. Fantastic. At least the sudden visions and tripping and constant bad luck should end now. He’s still pissed, but he can’t bring himself to fight anymore. This is all too weird, because he’s still convinced that Charles has come from his head as a result of sleep deprivation and debilitating guilt: there’s no such thing as ghosts.

“But there is,” Charles says slowly, and Erik’s tired, tired and sore and sad and fine, _fine,_ he’ll play along, he’ll pretend.

After a long while, he says, “If you are a ghost, how is it you can read my thoughts. If you were from my mind you’d know exactly what I’m thinking, which you do. Since when were ghosts telepathic?”

Charles sighs and shrugs. “I think it must be because I’m somehow spiritually connected to you. When- on the night of the party, the last thing I remember was Jean telling me about Scott and then… Then I woke up here, in your room, on the floor. I thought you must have come to pick me up, and I’d slept here. But then you woke up too, and you stared straight through me like I wasn’t there – because, to you, I wasn’t."

It’s a month back in his memory but it comes to Erik easily; dressing for work, biking to the library, chatting with Armando and Angel. Charles was there the whole time. He feels really, really sick.

“When your manager was talking about the crash, it just… came back. Listening to Jean screaming, feeling something at the top of my spine click wrongly, all of it. The way you walked right through me or looked past me. I wasn’t there to you.

“I tried to go home, to my family, to Raven, but for some reason I couldn’t make it out of this house unless you were leaving, too. I went to school with you, stood at the side of the hall as that _shitty_ ceremony went on, sat next to you in the principal’s office after you dislocated Bobby’s jaw. But you couldn’t see me or hear me, while I could hear all your thoughts and feel all your emotions, so I got frustrated. You were constantly cold, and I had to assume that was my doing – so I wanted to see how strong my influence was over you.”

Erik feels surprisingly calm, and actually rather empathetic – be it because of the telepathic bond or not. “So you started with hallucinations, because they would have been easier to control.”

“It was more a learning experience than revenge against you, though it was a little funny to see you so confused about misplaced books at the library,” Charles admits. “While I can only hear your mind, I can influence other people, just like I moved those books.”

“Hank – that time at the library, you were controlling him.”

Charles cringes. “It sounds pretty manipulative when you say it like that, though.”

“But it’s true.”

“I guess? As long as you’re around I can control anything. You’re like, my anchor in this world.”

“Why did it take you a month to make yourself known, then, if we’ve been connected since you died?”

Charles struggles to suppress his sigh. “It was hard enough to conjure a mortal form, let alone maintain one. I eventually grew stronger, though. The headaches - I can only assume that was from my overexertion.”  

Erik stars at him a long time, and Charles watches patiently. Charles Xavier is a ghost that’s been bound to his least favourite person in the mortal world. He’s not sure who’s worse off in this situation.

“I wouldn’t say least favourite person,” Charles teases quietly.

Erik’s voice is as flat as his gaze. “Stay out of my head.”

“Alright.” Charles is surprisingly placid. “Obviously, I adopt a corporeal form now, so I don’t have to turn the house upside down to make myself known. And I can make physical contact, so long as the emotion is there,” he tacks on with a snort. Erik harrumphs.  “Sorry about that. Come here.”

Erik’s breath gets all tangled up in his trachea when Charles leans over and brushes his cold fingers over his purple cheek, thumb tracing the cut of Erik’s jaw, knuckles pushing against the split bow of his  lips. The dull ache falls away with Charles’ hand, and the ghost hums happily. “There, you don’t look like you got beat by a spirit anymore.”

Erik scoffs. “You know I won, even if you can’t see it.”

They both realise that Charles is leaning in much too close at the same time. Erik pushes himself back and sits against the side of his bed, and Charles stares at the quilt pensively.

“So, you have healing powers as well or something?”

Charles gives him a shrug. “I’m not sure? I really don’t know how all this ghost stuff works. I can’t walk through walls, that much I know.”

“Then what even is the point of being a ghost,” Erik jokes dryly.

Charles replies in a fluster. “Well, I can, when I’m not focusing on being a physical form you can see. Feel me, my body feels just like yours, albeit without oxygenated blood. You can’t walk through walls with your body.” He has his arm stuck out at Erik, and Erik flicks his eyes between the ghost’s imploring face and its appendage. Charles has a sound forearm, just as any forearm should be, Erik thinks when he touches it. But it’s still ice cold and weird as fuck, in all honesty.

“Oh, well, I appreciate your honesty, thanks ever so much,” Charles mutters sarcastically.

“Stay out,” Erik spits back.

The silence they fall into is awkward, punctuated by Erik’s breathing which is ten times louder and more noticeable due to Charles’ _lack_ of breathing. It can’t be more than two minutes but it feels like two months have passed, so Erik sighs and tips his head back on the bed. He pretends he can’t feel Charles’ gaze on his throat. “Do you want to see your family?” he finally asks. Charles jolts.

“Well, yes, but how?”

“I can drive to your house, and sit out in my car in the street and you can just… walk or float or whatever, up to your house. As long as you’re nearby to me you can go wherever, right?”

But Charles hums when he’s finished, and it isn’t a considering sound. “Two issues with that – you actually haven’t seen my house, have you?” When Erik shakes his head, Charles groans again. “I lived on an estate – a pretty big estate. With like, grounds surrounding a… well, a castle. The street is probably a kilometer or two from the house – and even then, the treeline you’d have to park to hide in is too far from the house as well. I’ve tried seeing how far I can get from you. It isn’t very far.”

Erik isn’t even listening. “A castle.”

Charles bites his lip, and is suddenly very aware of the dilapidation of the house he’s in. “It’s technically a castle; Westchester Estate. It’s more of a mansion, it’s very old, back from early in the bloodline- but look, never mind that, the second reason why that wouldn’t work is because you’re the only one who can see me. I’ve tried presenting myself to others; to Jean when you both share a class, to Hank at the library – but I just… I can’t do it. The only reason you can see me is because I’m like, your ghost, I guess. I don’t know, I’m new to all this.”

“A castle,” Erik mutters incredulously. Charles flicks a fallen pencil at him.

“Shut up. I appreciate the offer though. Maybe- has Raven been back at school? I haven’t seen her, and I miss her more than anything. If you could find her at school I could at least look at her to make sure she’s taking care of herself, or- I know! You could arrange a meeting with her and I could sit there and write her messages and explain it all! I can touch things, I’m sure your face agrees with me on that one.”

Erik cocks an eyebrow. “And you don’t think she’d run screaming from that? I know she’s your sister, but I’m not ready to be written off as a fool, spouting about being able to commune with the spirit of Charles Xavier.”

“You could go to my house to pay respects, say you’re my friend, although I doubt Mother would get out of bed or my step-father would care too much. Raven would answer, though, and I could see her…”

“Charles, everyone knows that we aren't friends. Raven would know immediately something was up.”

Apparently the telepathic flow goes both ways, because a sudden gloom swamps Erik and weighs on his shoulders. He tries to shake himself out of it and sighs, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Look, I’ll try to find her at school, or get Hank to bring her to the library – I could talk to Armando about starting up some.. some.. book dating club, thing? I don’t know. But we have time, don’t.. it’s okay.”

Charles is quiet, biting his lip and staring out the window at the twilight. “I saw the interview on TV. I never thought I’d say it, but I really miss my mother.”

At school, Erik had heard rumours about Charles’ family, whispered between teeth and palms by two-faced people that only wanted his friendship like it was a commodity. When he looks at Charles he finds it hard to look away. Curled in on himself, he holds none of the charisma and confidence he exuded around school, permeating kindness and generosity. Erik wishes he’d been nicer to him when he was alive.

The sweater Charles is wearing looks as soft and fluffy as if it’d just come out of the dryer. His jeans are tight with not a crease, and shoes black and shiny like they’d never seen a scuff. The scarf looped around his neck is big, and there’s no caked or crusted blood in the fibers, no tears from the shower of glass that Erik heard had fallen into the skin on Charles’ face. He looks as normal as ever.

Charles catches him gazing and smiles a little. “At least I was hot when I died. Unfortunate for me if I died in my pyjamas.”

Erik swallows. “Would you like some other clothes? Can you change clothes like that? You can borrow some of mine for now if you’d like, and tomorrow we can go to the Target in town and buy you something else.”

The genuinely shocked expression that Charles pulls makes Erik’s stomach tighten. “You know, I actually really, really would like new clothes, thank you. You can’t imagine how dying with something makes you rather loathe to it.”

Erik’s wardrobe is primarily composed of loose tees and jeans, and he feels a little self-conscious from the bed where he sits watching Charles rifling through his closet. With not one ugly sweater or terrible cardigan, Erik truly doesn’t know what Charles will pick, and stands staring at the door after Charles ushers him out of the room. “I may be a ghost, but I can still keep my decency,” he says, and Erik tries not to scoff. Xavier was the biggest flirt in school, the only thing decent about him is his grades – and they’re hardly applicable now.

The jeans Charles is wearing when he lets Erik back in are much too long, and the ankles have been rolled thrice to suit Charles’ height, or lack thereof. They hug his thighs snugly, enveloping and accentuating all the muscle there built up from years on the school’s soccer team, and Erik doesn’t really know what it means when his mouth goes dry. He wets his lips and forces himself not to look away from Charles’ eyes hiding under tresses of his fringe; tells himself to stop thinking, and to not look down where Charles’ clavicles are peaking out of Erik’s too-big tee. A sprinkling of freckles dot the top of his chest. Erik wonders how far down they go.

“I probably have to head for dinner in a minute,” Erik manages eventually. “You don’t eat anymore, do you? Of course you don’t, sorry. That was stupid. I have some books you can read around here somewhere, and you can use my laptop if you’d like.”

Charles rolls his eyes. “Don’t worry, I won’t use your laptop, not ‘til you’ve had a chance to hide your porn.”

Erik stumbles over his words and hopes Charles doesn’t notice his red cheeks, but it’s futile because the ghost can probably _feel_ his embarrassment, if this telepathic tether between them really does exist. “I don’t keep porn on my computer,” he says softly.  

“Right, of course you don’t. Go eat, I promise I won’t interrupt.”

He has to pause midway down the stairs after he leaves Charles in his room. The absurdity of it all hits him. Charles Xavier died from a snapped neck with a snapped spine, and now he’s probably sitting at Erik’s desk looking at the tome of an anthology of poems that Munroe had lugged to them for the semester’s curriculum months ago.

It’s not the possibility of Charles popping opposite him at the dining table that scares him. It’s not knowing how he’s going to pretend everything is normal that frightens him more than the hauntings ever did.

*

It’s something he’d never really considered before, but when Erik pulls his pyjamas from underneath his pillow he realises with a weird twist in his stomach that ghosts probably don’t sleep. Charles confirms this for him with a puzzled look.

“My spirit is powering this body, I don’t need sustenance like living people. As long as my soul is here,” Charles points to his chest, “so is this.” He shakes his arm.

Erik supposes it makes sense. He's too tired to care anymore. “Why didn’t I see all _that_ before then?”

“Because I didn’t want you to. There’s no gift bag filled with a manual and complimentary mints that you get given when you die. There’s just this intrinsic, instinctual feeling that you follow. Mine stirred me awake next to you and won’t let me leave. The haunting, the possession; that was all me seeing how much I can control. It took a while to be able to hold a solid form continuously.”

“Oh, excellent,” Erik chortles. “I’m so glad I was your test dummy for this.” He briefly remembers afternoons filled with cold and guilt at a cemetery, and fingers sweeping over his cheek.

“Better you than someone I actually liked,” Charles leers. Erik knows it’s a joke, but it still hits something in him that he promptly ignores. He casts his quilt back and peels his shirt over his head. When Charles quietly sucks in a breath he doesn’t need, caught off guard, Erik pulls his lips in a smug smirk.

“So for the past month you’ve hung around with me, what did you do when I slept? Please tell me you didn’t watch me. I think that might be a bit too creepy to handle.”

Charles scoffs. “I may be dead but I’m still a morally sound person.”

“Debatable,” Erik mutters. Charles carries on whether he heard or not.

“I actually didn’t spend that much time hanging around you – mainly because it just felt invasive. When you were at the library I would go read, often sitting near Hank and trying to get him to notice me. When you were at school I’d sit in on my friends’ classes if they were nearby. Here at your home, I’d sit in the garden. Time passes quickly when you don’t have it anymore.”

“Is that what you’re going to do tonight?”

“Probably, or I’ll finish this magnificent novel of yours on cyborg romance I found stashed away – why, do you want me to stay by your side?”

Erik pulls a face. “Definitely no. I won’t sleep if I think you’re staring at me, and I’ve got school tomorrow. Then we can – I don’t know. Get you clothes. Figure out a way to get you to pass on, or whatever it is ghosts do.”

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying my company, truly,” Charles mutters. When Erik turns around to flick off the light, Charles has vanished. The book from the desk has gone too.

Maybe that is why Charles is still here – Erik’s seen a lot of movies and TV dramas, and the supernatural being has always had unfinished business in the mortal realm hindering its path to the other side. Maybe Charles has to say goodbye to his family and friends, pet his cat or turn in an assignment, and then he’ll be gone. For good, a small part of Erik thinks quietly. He won’t be coming back after that.

A truly Xavier-free life.

The idea no longer wears any of the allure it might have done a month ago.  

* * *

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all the comments, kudos, and bookmarks!!

When Erik wakes, there’s a short window of time where he forgets everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours and he sits on his bed in a blissful state of contentment. Then he looks over at his desk and sees Charles hunched over his book and it all comes flooding back with a groan.

“I thought you said you didn’t watch me sleep,” he grouses.

“I don’t,” says Charles, eyes never leaving the pages. “I just know you wake up at seven, so I thought I’d wait for you.”

“Right, okay. Right.” It’s too early for this. Erik’s not sure if he could handle having a personal ghost at anytime of the day.

“I’m so sorry this is inconvenient for you, how frustrating.” Was Charles always this sarcastic when he was alive? Erik remembers the classroom debates they’d gotten into before they’d almost parted ways as seniors – yes, yes he was.

“I told you to stay out of my head,” Erik grinds between his teeth, turning his back to make his bed.

“And I am _trying_ , but you think so loudly and I am new to this. Trust me, I want to stay out of your head more than you want me to. Unfortunately, you own no books on telepathy, so I’m not quite sure how to build up shielding techniques.” Charles has put on Erik’s brown jacket. It’s long on him, the cuffs sloppily folded thrice to make up for length Charles lacks, but it looks good.

Biting his lip and looking back to his bed, Erik’s not sure why he didn’t think of it before. “We can go to the library after school, there’s a supernatural-slash-paranormal section. There could be something on ghosts and on how to get you to, you know… move on, or whatever it is ghosts do.”

“Or,” begins Charles, whirling around all drama and wild eyes, “We could go see a medium.”

Erik stiffens. “A medium? Like a psychic or something? Don’t tell me you believe in them, they’re all fake.”

“Not this one,” Charles says, and when Erik finally looks over his shoulder back at at him there’s a glint in his eyes. He slides a piece of paper over the desk towards him. “Emma Frost; she’s the next town over but it shouldn’t be hard for us to get there. She seems decent.”

Charles has neat handwriting, Erik thinks accidentally. He tries to focus on the address. “How did you find this?”

“I _googled_ it,” Charles says slowly.

“You said you wouldn’t go on my laptop!”

“I knew you didn’t have porn, I can read your mind, remember?”

Erik rubs his face agitatedly. This has to be his Karma, has to be a life lesson in something, preparing Erik for greater challenges ahead. He can’t imagine what, though. Erik sighs into his palms. “We can go tomorrow, then. For now I have to get to school. We can try to find Raven today and get you some better fitting clothes.”

“What, you don’t like how I look in your clothes, Erik?” teases Charles. Erik looks at him flatly.

“I need my clothes. To wear.”

Charles mocks him silently as he turns back to the book. “Sorry, I didn’t realise there was no fun in the Lehnsherr house in the mornings.”

"Can you just get out so I can change,” Erik sighs impatiently. He hopes they figure out why Charles is still here quickly.

Charles rolls his eyes exaggeratedly and suddenly vanishes, book with him. Erik purses his lips.

“Can you teleport, too?” he wonders aloud. Charles’ voice comes from behind the door.

“Only within your radius, so what’s the point of being able to.” Erik tries to bite down a smile.

“It’s still cool.”

Charles doesn’t respond.

*

“How did you do it before? When I biked places?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t holding a physical form so it was like, my subconscious just followed you wherever you went.”

“Can’t you do that now? Just teleport to school.”

“I could,” Charles grins from where he’s leaning on the handlebars. “But where’s the fun in that?

Erik huffs, rubbing his eyes. He has to be at school in twenty, and all Charles has done this morning is waste his time with inane questions and teasing and bickering.

“Even if I wanted to ride with you on the bike, I couldn’t – you’d be too heavy and it’d take too long to get to school. I’m going now, you can trail after me however you do.” Somewhere in all that Erik hears Charles muttering about being called fat, but he ignores him and mounts his bike. By the time Erik realises how close their faces are, Charles has already smirked and vanished.

 _Don’t worry, I’m still here,_ his voice filters into Erik’s mind. It’ll take some time to get used to that.

Having to reel his thoughts in from straying into private matters he doesn’t want Charles to know about is taxing, and by the time Erik’s managed to peacefully clear his mind and think of nothing he’s glided past the school gates. He crouches to lock his bike into the rack by the entrance, and when he stands Charles is back with his hands in the pockets of his - _Erik’s_ \- jeans and gazing around at the throng of rushing students. Erik swallows and adjusts the straps on his bag.

“Do you miss it? School?”

“I miss everything,” Charles says quietly, not meeting his eyes. “Come on. You’re probably the type to actually _go_ to home-room, but you won’t be anymore if you keep dawdling.”

The sea of kids parts around Charles, who walks in front of Erik quickly. Charles must be influencing them to move around him, Erik supposes, and Charles’ voice whispers in his mind, _correct_. Erik thinks it’s unfairly ironic, how all the people who loved Charles can’t see him, even though he’s right here, while the one person who disliked him can. Jean, Scott, Marie, Kitty, Hank, Moira – they have no idea that Charles is still here, and there’s no way Erik could ever tell them. He’s still struggling to believe in ghosts himself, and _he’s_ being haunted by one.

While Erik sits in his classes, Charles meanders the halls searching as far as their bond will allow for Raven. In third period, Charles falls with a huff into the empty chair next to Erik. “No luck?” he mutters to the ghost, who flops onto the table melodramatically.

“No, I can only go as far as the cafeteria before I get snapped back closer to you. Are you sure you’ve seen her about?”

Erik hums and continues taking notes. “I haven’t seen her since before you died. I think she maybe came to the school memorial assembly, but she wasn’t on stage or anything. This school is really big, Charles, and it’s not like I move in the same circles as her.”

Charles sighs loudly in frustration. “I was the school captain of this place, I knew everyone here. Why is it so hard for you to know if you’ve seen one girl?”

Erik tries to tell himself that Charles isn’t trying to pick a fight, to calm down, but it’s a struggle not to turn around and sock him in the face. He presses his pen harder to the paper.

“Why is it such a big deal if she comes to school, anyway? Her brother just died, and it would have done a great number on her. She’s probably too depressed to come back.” Erik knows he’s walking a thin line, but he doesn’t care.

Charles, however, does. He pushes Erik’s open pencil case onto the floor with power, and pens skitter across the linoleum around the room. “Fuck you, Erik,” is all Charles seethes before disappearing. Erik sighs and moves to collect his belongings, with the eyes of the classroom on his back and that familiar guilty weight settling in his chest. 

* 

Erik doesn’t see Charles again ‘til last period, when he appears looking sullen by Erik’s desk just before the bell rings. “I’m sorry,” Erik says quietly, looking up at the ghost where he stands, watching over the class. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

By the time Charles speaks, the bell has already rung and everyone has moved in a flurry to pack their things and escape. Erik takes his time. “It’s okay. Just like you think I don’t understand things in quote-unquote _reality_ , I’m not quite sure you’d understand things in my world,” Charles says with a wry smile, and Erik doesn’t take offence – it’s probably true. That doesn't mean it sits right with him in his gut, however. 

They’re the last ones out of the classroom, and even though the silence between them is awkward Erik is glad Charles is back. It’s not even yet been twenty-four hours since he found out Charles’ spirit still lingered in the mortal realm, but Erik’s used to him being around. He’s not sure what that means.

Stepping out into the empty courtyard, Erik tries to break the silence. “So, _Target_? We can get you some books too, if you’d like.” Erik tries to look down at Charles from the corner of his eye without the ghost noticing. He’s still upset, but at least he tries to crack a smile now.

“Okay, but only the cheap stuff. I don’t want to put you out of pocket.”

“Nonsense, do you know how much I work? I’m slowly building up to millionaire status – your family should watch out, I’ll be buying shares from right under their noses soon." 

“How slowly? Will you be a threat to us by the next millennium?” Charles chuckles, genuinely, and Erik swats his shoulder as he goes to unlock his bike. When Charles is happy something swells up in Erik, warm and round and fizzling with joy. It must be the telepathic bond.

“Shut up. Sit on the back of my bike here, just let me put my blazer on it.” Erik’s glad he’s doesn’t have to look at Charles from where he’s padding the metal area behind his seat; he’s not sure if he’ll find a fake smile or a real one, and doesn't know which one would be better or worse.  

He feels Charles watching him wheel the bike out of the slot. Standing over the seat, Erik dumps his bag into the front basket before turning to look over his shoulder at Charles settling on the rear. His hand comes up to Erik’s shoulder, bracing himself, and it’s an odd sensation – a weight that isn’t warm but isn’t necessarily cold, either.

“If you straddle the seat, you’re going to hurt your, um. Your crotch. It’s better to sit side-saddle. At least, in my experience,” Erik advises awkwardly, trying not to flush at his own words. Erik’s never seen Charles embarrassed before, but he supposes this is how it must look without any blood to fill his cheeks. He gives a quiet ‘oh’ before repositioning himself.

Kicking off is initially awkward, bike cumbersome and slow to push. It doesn’t help that Charles wobbles, or that his hands have moved to Erik’s sides. “Try to balance your weight,” he grunts, “Or we’re going to topple over.”

“I _am_ trying, I’ve never done this before,” Charles says with agitation, but Erik can hear the delight lacing his words.

It takes to the end of the street for Erik to build up momentum, but when he has it they fly through the town, Charles’ gasps and small noises of fear filling his ears and his fingers scrunching in his jumper. His chest is pressed to Erik’s back, and Erik pretends not to notice. At some point, Charles’ hands slide under his shoulders to his chest, one just under his collarbones and the other over his right pectoral. Erik pulls them into the mall’s parking lot before Charles’ hands can wander any further.

Charles stretches when he stands from the bike, pulling up the too-big jeans and turning around to grin at Erik from where he crouches, weaving the lock around the tyres and to a pole. His hair is windswept, pushed off his face and wild around his eyes. Erik swallows.

“We have to bike everywhere, that was so much fun.” Erik grabs his bag and starts walking towards the looming building, leaving Charles to patter after him.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it – I can assure you my legs are just as happy as you are at having to push twice my weight.” Charles pushes his shoulder, stepping quickly to match Erik’s long strides.

“Hush. Exercise is good for you; enjoy your beating heart.”

“Right, well. When we get into the store, you can’t talk to me like you normally would. I’m not having mothers ushering their children away from me when it seems like I talk to myself in public.”

“You worry about what people think of you so much. But okay,” Charles concedes. _What about talking like this_?

Erik startles, and hopes that the worker greeting at the door didn’t notice underneath her fake smiles, customer-voice, and catalogues. Erik nods to her, taking a catalogue if only to whack Charles with later. “I don’t know how to do that,” he mutters between his teeth, making a beeline for the men’s section at the back of the store. He can practically hear Charles rolling his eyes.

_Just think, loudly and clearly. That’s all I’m doing to get through to you._

_But I don’t want you in my head,_ Erik manages, and Charles sighs exasperatedly.

“All right, okay – ‘stay out of my head,’ I’ve got it. Look like a weirdo, then. It makes no difference to me. 

“Just find something you like, and be quick about it,” Erik bites, riffling through a pile of shirts with a huff. “What size are you? Medium? This shirt is nice.” He holds a long-sleeved tee that’s probably the colour of sad, muddy grass. He feels Charles behind him, peering over his shoulder, and can sense him scrunching his nose 

“Are you serious? I would never wear that, not even dead. Put it back, right now. I’ll get something.”

Erik sighs and folds it neatly, trying very hard to be patient but finding it – well, very hard. “You can’t touch anything. I can’t explain why shirts are levitating next to me, and I don’t want to try perchance someone looks over or it gets played on the security camera.”

“I’m half tempted to knock over an entire display table and pin it on you now,” Charles says lightly. “Just pick something that looks like what I’d normally wear.”

All the sighing Erik’s done today could probably fuel a small forest in carbon dioxide, so he tries to refrain and instead stares at a rack of turtlenecks for a moment. “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but while you were alive I didn’t actually focus on you so often.”

“Don’t lie to me, Erik,” the ghost chides haughtily, swooping to a shelf of button-ups. Erik ignores him and smiles awkwardly at the man walking into the section, piling print-tees into his arms, along with a plain knitted cardigan and tight jeans. He has no idea if they’ll fit Charles, but he’s in too much of a rush to care, making for the cashiers at the front of the store and not bothering to look if Charles is following him. “Where are you going?” Ah, he is. “You can’t pay for them now, I haven’t tried them on yet.”

There’s too many people milling around for Erik to snap anything at him, so he complies with Charles and heads towards the changing rooms. A handful of men’s rooms cower next to the plethora of women’s changing stalls, and the bored looking attendant gives Erik the clothing token before stepping out into the women’s section, not looking back. Charles is already in a stall shucking his jacket, and makes an indignant sound when Erik sidles into the stall close to him, pulling the curtain shut.

“What are you doing?” Charles hisses, more for effect than for keeping quiet.

Erik frowns at him, and tells him in an exasperated whisper, “If that attendant comes back, how weird is it going to look if I’m just standing out the front of the stall when I was the one who walked in with the clothes. I’ll turn around, just hurry up.”

“Shut your eyes too, then,” Charles grouses, and gives a tight hum of approval when Erik turns to the wall and shuts his eyes. The space is hardly big enough for one person, let alone two, and with his eyes shut Erik is hyper aware of the way Charles’ elbows sometimes knock into his back when he pulls his jeans up, or the way the backs of his legs brush Erik’s thighs when he moves about. At one point Charles’ backside bumps Erik’s, and Erik hopes that Charles can’t hear his thoughts anymore because keeping his baseline, subconscious feelings in check is proving to be a struggle. His breathing seems obscenely loud in the cramped space, and he thinks his palms are beginning to sweat where they’re braced against the cheap, chipboard wall.  

“Erik,” Charles calls gently, and Erik tries not to gasp. “Turn around. Does this look okay?”

The shirt he’s pulled on could probably be the next size up, and the cardigan Erik chose is long with its sleeves flopping around Charles’ fingers, but he looks good, genuinely good and small and touchable in his clothes. Erik stands looking over his shoulder in the mirror, and Charles’ hair tickles his nose, threatening to coax a sneeze out of him.

“You look nice,” Erik manages quietly, meeting Charles’ eyes in his reflection. He has to get out of this stall. “They suit you. Do you want to go look at books now?”

“Yes. Now turn back around while I get changed, you’re probably having a billion perverted thoughts and I’d rather not be in such close proximity to you whilst you do.”

*

“Can we stop by the cemetery on the way home?” Charles asks after Erik pays, fingers straining purple under the weight of all the plastic bags he’s carrying. 

“Why?” he grits out, making a beeline for his bicycle. 

Charles shrugs and drags his feet as he walks, staying quiet til Erik lugs the _Target_ bags into the basket on the front of his bike. “I don’t know. I just wanted to see it.”

“Didn’t you see your grave every time that I-” Erik can’t finish his sentence, realising what he’s saying half way through. He climbs onto the bike and doesn’t look back as Charles clambers on after him.

“Not really, I usually just hung back. I never felt ready to see it. To, you know. Fully take it in, and all.”

Erik feels Charles’ cold, tentative hands coming up to grip his shoulders. “Okay. Fine, but we can’t be long.” He flicks off a text to his mother before pedaling them out of the car park and towards the west of town where the graveyard is located. Charles’ hands hardly wander, for that Erik is grateful, and after a quiet fifteen minute ride he pulls them up to the ancient, flaking cast iron gates, hopping off (and ushering Charles off, as well) and wheeling the bike down the shifting grey gravel to the row of plots he knows Charles’ body lies in. It’s muscle memory at this point.

He feels he should slow down or nudge Charles, look back at him at the least, to make sure he’s okay, but he can’t get himself to move save form walking the intrinsic instinct line down to Charles’ grave. There’s no one here today so far, and for that he’s glad – for Charles’ sake as much as his own.

“It’s just down there,” Erik tells him, as gently as he can manage, nodding down the row as he kicks the stand on his bike. Charles passes him, almost floating. When he stops, Erik hears him suck in a breath.

“I wanted to be cremated,” Charles says testily, glaring at the mound in front of his feet, as long as him and headed by a slab of black marble. “I can’t believe they buried me. I wanted to be cremated.”

Then Charles looks up and fixes a determined gaze on Erik, and Erik blanches in turn.

“Nuh-uh. No way. We’re not doing that; I’m not doing that-"

“Oh, please, Erik, come on. It was my dying wish-”

“You’re already dead! What does it matter?!” Erik tries to keep the hysteria out of his voice. He fails.

“You liked my body well enough when I was alive, just imagine I’m sleeping or something,” Charles beseeches. Erik feels the cold sweat of panic prickling the back of his neck so he ignores Charles’ comment and looks out over the graveyard. “Maybe _that’s_ why I’m still here, because they buried my body instead of burning it?”

“Even if I was willing to dig up your body, and drag it to my car, and drive it to my home- I don’t have an incinerator, and bones don’t burn in normal fires. I couldn’t just have a pyre in my backyard.”

There’s a small part of Erik, the same dormant stir that rose every time he’d see Charles at school, one he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring, pushing it so deep down in him he almost convinced himself it didn’t exist, that he feels heavy in his chest. Now it whispers: what if he’s right, and burning his body is what he needs to pass on. Would you do that for him, or would you keep him for yourself?

Charles sighs dejectedly. “You’re right. And I don’t think we can very well sneak into the crematorium… Oh well.” Erik watches him look out at the graveyard, at the fresh plots and crumbling stone. 

Erik’s not sure if the guilt he feels is the perpetual cold heaviness in his chest he’s had for a month now, or if this is the stinging of a fresh wound. He sits down at the bottom of Charles’ grave, rich soil caking in his jeans. “Can you see them?” he asks gently. “The other ghosts?”

Charles settles in close next to him, accidentally pressing his arm against Erik. Neither of them shifts apart.

“Yes,” begins Charles slowly, and Erik tries not to be distracted by his solid presence at his side. “But it’s… different. To looking at living people in the street, it’s different. You look at each other but you pretend you haven’t. You don’t interfere with them, just watch them go by. We’re all stuck here for a reason, and no one’s figured out why yet. And when we do figure it out - the meaning of life, the meaning of death - it’ll be too late to tell anyone who needs to hear it.”

They sit like that until dusk, quiet and close with Erik keenly aware of his pulse and keenly aware of Charles’ cold arm and telepathy. “I don’t read your mind anymore, so long as you don’t think loud enough for me to overhear,” Charles tells him with a sigh, looking back over his shoulder at the dirt. “I’m under there. _My body_ is under there. I’m so close, and yet I’m just out of reach.”

“I thought that every time I sat here,” Erik admits quietly, and he can feel Charles looking at him, feel his gaze sweeping his face, eyes swinging left to right like a pendulum, but he can’t look at him. He can’t, because he’s scared of what he’ll see if he does. Charles is _dead_ now. Something like this was never meant to happen to bright, benevolent Charles Xavier, but the universe messed up as it’s prone to do, and here they are. Whatever feelings he had for him while he was alive, whatever sliver of attraction that overpowered Erik’s rational mind and rational dislike for Charles, is irrelevant now. Charles is dead, six feet under, and yet sitting next to him in Erik’s own clothes.

But he’s still just out of reach.

By the time they get home, the sky is streaked with purple and orange with the sun on the brink of sinking under the horizon. Charles’ hands are firm and tame on Erik’s shoulders, and the _Target_ bags crinkle in the basket as Erik speeds them along the footpaths towards his house. “You sent your mother a text saying you’d be late, right? I don’t like her worrying,” Charles asks as Erik pulls them up the driveway. 

“You sound as if you know her personally,” Erik chides, loading plastic bags into his arms after he kicks the stand on his bike. “But yes, I did. She’ll still worry though; that’s what mothers do.” 

“Is it? I’m not sure I’d know,” Erik thinks he hears Charles say quietly, but he can’t comment before the front door is opened for him and his mother is fussing about him, pulling him inside. Edie takes the bags from him as he toes off his shoes by the door, watching Charles’ solemn expression from the corner of his eye.

“Are you trying out a new style?” she asks, holding up the brown cardigan with a small pinch in her brow. Erik needn’t even tell her he’s a homosexual, that cardigan is doing it all for him. 

But Erik can see Charles looking at _him_ now, and he smiles wryly. “I guess you could say that.”

* * *

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gay ~~mutant~~ ghost road trip! 
> 
> As usual, thanks for reading! :)

Erik wakes to the clicking of keys three minutes before his alarm is due to go off. His mind is blanketed by something warm before panic can set in, something that says, _it’s only Charles_ , and he lets out a sigh that’s a mix of relief and exasperation.

“I know, I know: stay out of your head. But there’s a difference between mind reading, accidentally overhearing your thoughts, and shutting down emotional responses that _I_ also experience – so.” Charles is dressed in his new clothes, Erik notes when he looks over at him, sat tapping on the laptop. They suit him. “Anyway, hurry and get ready. According to the map it’ll take about an hour and a half to get to the club, which is where the medium does her consultations, apparently. Will your parents mind you skipping school?”

“They shouldn’t: it wouldn’t be the first time,” Erik grumbles, rolling out of bed and digging the heels of his palms in his eyes. His phone chirps and rattles on his nightstand. Charles makes no comment, whether he heard or not. “I have to work at four, though, so we can’t be there for too long. We go there and come straight back.”

Charles pulls a face. “You’re no fun.”

“I can be fun,” Erik rebuts, walking over and poking through his closet. “I’m oodles of fun.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Charles says dryly. Erik throws a scarf at him. He catches a glimpse of the laptop’s screen, and recognizes instantly what site Charles is on.

“What’s that?” he asks, coming up behind him. The ghost closes the window immediately, but Erik has his eyebrows raised and all Charles can do is sigh.

“I was looking on Raven’s _Facebook_ profile. Erik, I don’t want to fight again, not today. Please don’t comment.”

There’s a still moment in the space between them. “Can I ask if you found anything recent?” is all Erik asks quietly, looking down at Charles. Surprise blooms in his chest.

“Nothing since a few weeks ago. Since… before. I’m trying not to worry; sometimes if she was mad at a boy or her friends she would delete her account in a tantrum, but…” Erik squeezes his shoulder. He tries not to flinch at the chill.

“Are you sure I wouldn’t understand? We can talk about this, if you want.”

Charles doesn’t answer him. Erik pretends he doesn’t hear the waver in his voice when he speaks. “I think there’s a _7-Eleven_ on the way. Can we please stop to see if they have _Krispy Kremes_?”

Erik pulls his hand away awkwardly, and tries to joke. _Oodles of fun._ “You’re a ghost; what are you going to do with a donut?”

“You can eat it for me,” Charles says, looking up over his shoulder with wide eyes. “And I can experience it through you.”

Erik cringes. “That’s just weird. I’m changing; out you hop.”

Charles sighs, standing up sluggishly and swiping Erik’s phone off the stand. The jeans his wearing, the ones Erik chose, hug his thighs just shy of too tight, and after a long moment Erik comes back to himself and makes a point of averting his eyes and dragging them up to Charles’ face when he speaks. “What’s your passcode? I’ll set up _Maps_ so we’re ready to go.”

“I don’t have one?” he tries. Charles’ mouth hangs open.

“Are you serious? What if someone goes through your stuff?”

“I have nothing to hide. Why, did you? I sure hope there was nothing indecent on your phone when they retrieved it from the crash.” Charles grumbles something under his breath, and takes the door for once. The idea of Charles taking naked photos and sending them to someone else makes something in Erik’s gut tight, but he tries to ignore it as he shucks his tee.

*

Erik’s parents leave for work after he leaves for school on most days, so Erik makes sure he finishes breakfast in time, just like he usually would. Charles is waiting by the front door, eyeing the photographs on the bookcase and hanging from the wall, hands in pockets and stooped a little. Erik sucks in his breath too quickly and coughs, effectively getting Charles’ attention but it’s ineffective at killing the swell in his chest. The ghost snorts air he doesn’t need and tilts his head to the door. Erik nods almost imperceptibly, looking at the dark, polished floorboards.

The sky is grey, heavy and overcast and full. Erik likes driving in the rain, something about feeling secure and warm while the clouds wring themselves out and the wind slips through the trees, water running in rivulets down headlights and windscreens and cold steel. He’s just not sure if Charles would appreciate the weather like he does. As they walk to where his car is snug against the curb, Charles sucks in a breath, and when Erik looks back at him he’s staring at the car with wide, cold eyes and his fingers clawing the back of Erik’s anorak, shrugged on over his uniform.

“Charles?”

“I haven’t been in a car since- well, obviously I haven’t been in a car since I died.” Charles tries to laugh it off, but there’s a flash in his eyes that Erik doesn’t like- _frightened, anxious, pleading._

“We can catch a bus,” Erik remedies quickly. “We could take the bus, or a train; we don’t have to drive. Let me check my phone, I’m sure there’s a bus coming soon…”

He never let those wide blue eyes sway him when Charles was alive, and Erik wishes, more than anything in the world, that he had. Charles looks up at him now, and he must see that on the other boy’s face.

“Thank you, Erik. It’s... all right. I’m dead now, what does it matter,” he chuckles weakly. Erik’s not sure what to say, so he just squeezes Charles’ shoulder. The chill doesn’t surprise him anymore. “You’d better have good music,” he is all he says, sliding out of Erik’s touch to the passenger side.

“I don’t have central locking,” Erik warns with a fake smile as he keys his door open and slips into his seat.

“Boy, I didn’t know there was a time without central locking,” he hears Charles mocking, muffled on the other side of the glass. Erik rolls his eyes and leans over to flick the lock up.

“I hate to break it to you but the passenger seat doesn’t adjust, either.”

“How will I survive? The car I died in had central locking _and_ functioning seats: there’s no hope for me now.”

Erik wishes he’d known Charles was so easy to joke with when he was alive. They could have been great friends. The engine turns over with its usual suspicious clunking, rattling to life with the familiar clinking of something metal in the back that Erik’s never been able to find. A leaf must be caught in the fan again, because a high-pitched whirring sings when Erik turns the heater on which gushes cold air into th even colder car. “It’s not me!” Charles cries, hands up in surrender when Erik looks at him from the corner of his eye. “I’m not haunting anything!”

The radio fuzzes as Erik pulls into the street, after tossing Charles his phone to activate the GPS. “Where’s your music?” the ghost grumbles, thumbing at the device.

Erik smiles wryly. “I usually just have the radio on, or drive in silence.”

“You lied! You said you had good music!” Charles huffs, flopping back against his seat.

“No, I never confirmed I had good music. I have like, three songs on my phone. We can put them on repeat til we get there.” Charles doesn’t bother responding, sighing and sinking down into the too-far back seat. It hits Erik, then, and he says with trepidation, “Do you need a distraction? Are you sure you’re okay in the car?”

Charles doesn’t look up, and Erik pretends hi doesn’t see him rolling his bottom lip between his teeth. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to have any flashbacks or freak-outs on you.”

The heating finally starts to kick in. “Seriously, Charles – if you need a distraction, or if you want to pull over at any time, please tell me.”

Erik looks at Charles, at the worry in his eyes, which he tries to hide but to Erik it sits plain as the blue that fills them.

“I’m okay, Erik. I’m… just keep your eyes on the road, please.”

“All right,” Erik manages. “Okay. I think my branch head downloaded some books on my phone, you can flick through them if you want. Just don’t forget to check the map.”

Charles hums his acquiesce, and they sit in silence until he cries, incredulously, “You have Jane Austen?” Erik tries to grumble that it’s all Armando’s doing, but Charles is laughing too much for him to be heard. It doesn’t bother him though, because the giggles that slip through Charles’ lips are genuine and soft and real, with no fear or panic or death coating them.

They drive in silence for a long while, the radio occasionally buzzing in with static and a pop song that Charles will comment on, but say nothing more. Charles has got his feet up on the dash when he asks: “Is it okay if I go on your _Facebook_? Just to see what the gossip is. I feel very alienated.”

It’s not like Erik minds, he doesn’t really go on his account much at all himself: the downside of not having very many friends. However suspicion is a twinge below his ribs and curiosity itches his tongue, and so he asks, “Didn’t you check it this morning?”

“Well, yeah, but that was for like one minute to check on Raven.”

Erik shrugs. “It’s fine with me, but I’m only friends with a handful of people from school so you won’t see much. You can just log on with your account if you want.”

Charles makes a noise like he’s remembered something then. “You didn’t accept my friend request that I sent like, years ago.”

Erik knows, but he doesn’t say anything. Charles doesn’t call him out.

Sans the heater and the ubiquitous dubious-sounding rattling, they drive in silence, until Charles makes a noise and pulls his legs down from the dash with a thunk. “Oh! Jean and Scott got together!” he says, sitting up straight in his seat. “ _Finally_! I’m so mad I missed this. Gosh, what I wouldn’t give to see Jean for five minutes.”

The stoplight they pull up to is parallel with a dilapidated fast food joint, and Erik stares at it like he’s never seen a sun-faded, four-by-three squared meter poster of a blown up hamburger before. He’s counted sesame seed number twenty-seven when the lights turn green, and he says, with eyes fixed determinedly on the road, “Armando, the partner of Scott’s brother Alex, is the head librarian at work. This afternoon I can ask him what he knows, and if you’re lingering you can get all the details without having them botched up by my relay of it.”

He can feel Charles staring at him, and he’s thankful he has to keep his eyes on the road. “That would be really lovely of you, Erik.” His eyes are heavy on him, and Erik wills himself not to blush. Then Charles finally, blessedly looks away, gazing back out at the road.“I didn’t know Scott’s brother was in a relationship. How long has he been with his partner?”

Erik’s worked at the library since he was old enough to apply for a job, not wanting to feel a burden on his parents or their lackluster bank accounts. He remembers Alex coming into the library after having _accidentally_ ordering two coffees, almost every morning, and remembers shifts where Armando talked Erik’s ear off going on and on about how nice and attractive and strong he found Alex to be. It was after the tenth double up on a tall, soy milk, double shot caramel latte that Armando finally asked Alex on a date, to which the eldest Summers sibling had promptly gone red and nearly dropped the gargantuan autobiography everyone knew he wasn’t really interested in on the floor. “Going on four years now,” is all Erik says. Charles hums happily.

“That’s sweet. What about you?”

Erik pretends he doesn’t accidentally tap the brakes too hard and tries to speak with an even voice. “What do you mean?”

Charles doesn’t miss a beat. “Are you dating anyone? 

“I- what? No?”

“It’s really not something to get so worked up about, Erik,” Charles laughs. “But I am surprised. You’re not unattractive, you know.”

Erik’s still stranded somewhere in the segue from Jean and Scott and Armando and Alex to _himself_ and someone else.”Why would I date someone? I’m not-” Amiable? Approachable? Nice in general?

Charles makes a noise. “Wait, so have you never…?” 

Erik steadies an even look at the ghost. “If I’ve hardly any friends, what makes you think I’d have any romantic endeavours under my belt? You were on top of all the gossip at school, you’d have known if I was dating some unfortunate person. Don’t look so surprised.”

“So have you never kissed anyone, then?” Charles asks incredulously, and Erik hopes that he’s imagining him edging towards him from his seat.

“You make it sound like you’re well versed in all this,” Erik says dryly, hoping the way he sits closer to the door is subtle enough, trying to ignore the spike of jealousy coiling in his gut.

“Well, sure, I mean, everyone’s kissed _somebody_ by the time they’re eighteen,” Charles explains. “It’s just… It’s just _meant_ to happen.”

“There’s no checkpoint in teenagehood that you reach, there’s no list of things you have to do before you’re an adult,” Erik shoots him down, turning his frustration into words. “Obviously, I’m just more focused on what’s important.” Charles doesn’t speak after that, for a long while until the tension gets too heavy for Erik to breathe. Clearing his throat, he manages to ask, tries to spin some humour into his words, “What else is happening at school? Have you seen all the posts on your wall, all seven-thousand of them?”

Charles tries a laugh and waves him off. “Shush, they’re nice. And how did you know about the posts? Where you stalking my profile?”

Erik pulls them onto the next section of freeway and doesn’t respond.

“I have about three hundred messages in my inbox as well. Imagine if I opened them; ‘ _seen by Charles from beyond the grave_.’” He chuckles quietly to himself, and they sit in silence once again, Erik driving, Charles scrolling – until Charles omits a tiny ‘oh’ and looks pointedly out the window.

“What’s up?” Erik asks, but he can feel it heating his ears: embarrassment. “You need to reel in that telepathy if you can, I have my own emotions to deal with,” he tries to leer, but Charles just whines and head-butts the window.

“Those messages I sent you, on the night of the party. I… I’m sorry, I-”

Erik knows exactly what Charles is trying to bring up, and he shuts it down before the ghost can say the words and let them hang in the space between them, heavy and awkward and making something anxious turn over in Erik’s gut. Maybe it’s noble, maybe he’s trying to save Charles’ dignity like he’d intended to the night of the accident; but Erik knows under his skin that he’s just selfish and can’t, _won’t,_ admit to anything. Just like last time.

“If I didn’t ignore them you wouldn’t be dead. I’m the one who’s apologetic. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

It’s too blunt, and Erik may as well have flipped the car for the shock that flits along Charles’ skin and into Erik’s synapses. Erik’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel, and he grits his teeth and hopes and hopes hard that Charles doesn’t bring up feelings, because the simple truth of it is that Erik doesn’t have any for him, _can’t_ have any for him. He doesn’t want to let Charles down like that. Once is enough for a lifetime. 

A deflated, “Yeah,” is all that Charles emits for the remainder of the ride, until the phone chirps in his hand and he clears his throat. “The club is just around the block, apparently, but I don’t think there’ll be parking.”

Erik hums and pulls them into a grocery store car park, glancing forlornly at the heavy clouds, a dark grey on par with the tar road. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way. Come on, let’s beat the rain.”

The footpath is warped from age and heat, jagged cracks rising and falling unevenly, weeds crawling up through them seeking the sun. A handful of people are running their own errands, but it’s a handful too many to be around, so Erik takes the phone and leads the way. With Charles at his side, it almost feels natural to reach out and take his hand, and he almost does, sinews stretching and fingers fluttering over the cool of Charles’ knuckles- and then he stuffs his fist in his pocket, knuckles white and nails digging crescents into his palm as a reminder, and plays the whole thing off like an accident, a gentle brush from momentum. Nothing more. Charles doesn’t speak.

The map leads them down a tight alley, which smells of damp and doesn’t sound dissimilar underfoot as they trudge through the puddles and over slicked cobblestones. When Erik speaks, his voice echoes off the mossy, moudy buildings encasing them. “This is it?” he asks, managing to find the perfect balance between dull and incredulous. Charles huffs.

Above a solid steel door lined with rivets and decorated with circa early twenty-first century graffiti reads, emblazoned in weak, flickering neon, ‘ _Hellfire Club’._

“Are you sure your Emma Frost isn’t a stripper? Try and tell me that doesn’t sound like a stripper name.”

“Look, Erik, shush. We’re here now, let’s just go in and see how it is, all right?”

“It’s fine for you, no one can see you. No bouncer is going to lug a brick in your face for looking at him wrong,” Erik complains, sliding his phone into his pocket and turning around, back down the alley. He stops when Charles grabs his arm.

“You think I’d let that happen to you?” Erik hopes that’s rhetorical, because there’s no way he can answer. “Come on, you’re eighteen, right? Just say you’re looking for Emma.”

Erik sighs and steps back to the door. “If I end up inadvertently booking a room with a prostitute and have to pay for it, you can reimburse my wallet and my pride.”

Charles grins. “Oh, the latter should be impossible, what with your ego.” He’s still holding Erik’s arm. “Shall I knock then?”

Despite the cliché in Erik that imagines a panel sliding across in the door to reveal a pair of heavyset eyes belonging to security, no such window opens. When Charles raps his knuckles on the metal it echoes hollowly, and they wait a moment with paused breath, Erik trying to still his hands and stop his leg bouncing. Nothing bad will happen, Charles is a ghost, he can send the entire block into upheaval, if Emma’s not here they’ll just drive home and Erik will go to work and look for books on the paranormal and talk to Armando like he’d planned—

The door swings open inwards, and a man with a red face pokes his head around the corner. Erik opens and closes his mouth like a fish. The man waits, stares at him, grunts, and goes to close the door again, until Erik grabs the edge and manages to croak out, “Wait. We’re- _I’m_ here to see Emma Frost.”

It sounds a lot more stable than he feels, and the man with the red skin (red? _Red_?! How is that even _possible-_ ) grunts again, eyes slinking over Erik’s frame, and slowly, so slowly it makes Erik’s gut turn over and his skin crawl, the man’s lips split into a smirk that reveals the crooked stark-white teeth his mouth holds.

“Well, of course, come in,” Erik thinks he hears under all that accent. “Emma, there is a child for you. He is alone.” Erik bristles, and makes to open his mouth, but then the door is being swung fully open and a woman dressed in draping whites is standing next to the bouncer.

“He isn’t alone at all, are you, Erik Lehnsherr?” the woman lilts, raking her diamond clear eyes over Erik and pouting her pink lips.

“She’s the real deal,” Charles murmurs appreciatively in his ear. Erik’s stuck between trying to figure out how she knew his name and how she isn’t freezing in her brassier-cape combo.

“Come on in now, sugar,” Emma Frost coos, and Erik _prays_ that Charles doesn’t let go of his arm, because he feels seriously out of his depth in the dark club. Booths have been ushered to the perimeter of the room, where purple light can only just brush its fingers, and a billiards table and a small grouping of chaise lounges fill the space between the booths and the bar. Two men sit lazily puffing smoke like chimneys, and they watch Emma with heavy eyes as she leads Erik into the room. “Come sit down the back here, and we can discuss your predicament and talk about payment.”

“Payment?” Erik croaks, and Emma looks at him like he’s a child.

“Yes, darling, my services aren’t for free.” Erik half expects her to turn around and tug on his ear, or slap his wrist. She only chuckles lightly, and leads them into a back room. Her white boots clip on the wooden steps down to the sunken in sitting area, which is filled with plush lounges and a low table.

A cool spot is left in the crux of Erik’s arm when Charles pulls away from him to take the few steps down to the seats. Erik refrains from rubbing it away. Emma sits with her long legs crossed, leaning back with the golden tresses of her hair curling across her shoulders and pooling in the hollows above her collarbones. Charles sits opposite and Erik manages to get his stiff legs to function, walking him over to Charles’ side before sitting up straight with his knees together next to him.

“Refreshments?” Emma asks pleasantly, and Erik shakes his head and manages a respectable enough ‘no, thank you’. For a long moment Emma just stares at him with a slight frown, but then she smiles gently and folds her fingers in her lap. “You have an issue with a ghost,” she says calmly. “Although, I wouldn’t say it’s an issue, and neither would you.”

Erik clears his throat and ignores her last comment, but Charles interrupts before Erik can get any mess of a sentence out.

“Can you see me?” he asks quietly, and Emma’s eyes slide from Erik over towards the space Charles sits in.

“No, I can’t,” she says bluntly. “But I can feel you. And hear you, up here.” She taps her temple for emphasis.

“Are you a telepath?” Erik blurts nervously, and Emma laughs like crystal, tipping her delicate chin back.

“If only, sugar. I can hear more than just your thoughts. I can feel your every emotion before you do; I can see the colours of your aura and the shape of your soul. Everything you’ve ever thought of, seen, experienced, I can know in an instant regardless of whether you want me to or not. Whether the soul is _organically_ contained or not is irrelevant,” she finishes with a smirk.

“So you can still feel the souls of the dead, souls that are stuck here,” Erik clarifies slowly, and Emma hums.

“That _is_ why I am called a medium. What is it that I am doing for you and your ghost today, Erik Lehnsherr?”

Erik shifts in his seat. “He’s not my _-_ What I- what Charles and I want to know is why he hasn’t moved on. I think.” He glances at Charles for clarification, getting an earnest nod in reply.

Charles speaks, sitting forward on the couch and taking over with the easy confidence he’s always exuded. “Why am I still here? Why am I stuck to Erik? We weren’t- That is, when I was alive, we weren’t close...”

Emma watches him a long while, eyes lingering on the space she knows he’s filling next to Erik. “Souls often get stuck in limbo because they have unfinished business in the mortal realm. But you already figured this out, didn’t you? You hadn’t finished all that you’d meant to before you died, Charles Xavier. I think you and I both know to what I am referring. As for why Erik, of all people, well… the answers to your questions aren’t exactly sovereign points, so to say. It is peculiar, though, for a soul to bond like so to a person. Usually ghosts are restricted to the place where they died, or a place they have a strong emotional attachment to.”

Erik feels Charles stiffen next to him, and finds him staring at Emma heatedly. She just smirks back at him, icy eyes swinging between the ghost and Erik. She continues anyway. “I can’t tell you what you need to do to move on, Charles; you have figure that out for yourself. And then when you’re not being anchored here by your commitments, you come back to me, and I pass you on.”

“Like _Charon_?” Charles asks quietly, and Emma hums happily and inspects her sharp nails.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that. And, just like like _Charon,_ I require an _obol_ to ferry you over. I hate to break it to you, but having a ghost stuck on you is a very expensive predicament one can find themselves in, Erik.” Erik tenses at that, trying to bite his lip to keep from sighing and glaring at Charles. “Ah, that’s right. You don’t like spending money, do you, Erik?” Emma teases lightly, but Charles is speaking before Erik can snap at her.

“He doesn’t like people in his head. Please don’t read him,” Charles beseeches in a strange mix of stern and polite that makes something in Erik’s chest tight. Emma just gives Charles’ space another look that Erik can’t decipher; doesn’t want to. He wants no part in the telepathic conversation taking place.

Emma makes no verbal comment, at least, eyes slowly flicking onto Erik. “If Charles doesn’t pass on eventually, his spirit is going to start to turn sour. You see those horror movies about the angry poltergeists and spirits trapped in old houses and buildings? They’re a mockery, but they hold some truth. Charles, you’re currently staying in this realm longer than you’re meant to. A few weeks, even half a year, some ghosts do fine stuck in limbo. But most don’t."

Charles lets out a shaky breath beside him. He's been here for over a month already. Erik squeezes his thigh, trying to ease him.

Emma continues. “They’ll start to forget who they were when alive. Even something little could trigger their rage, and they’ll destroy everything around them. The controlled hauntings become out of control. A prank could end up killing a human, and when ghosts kill the living it just starts a cluster of bad energy and anger that could cause an earthquake if left untreated. It’s much easier to clear a passive and willing spirit than it is one that’s got its claws in this reality, and I speak from experience.”

Erik swallows. “So it’s either pay to pass him on or leave Charles to cause a sinkhole the size of the town? That’s all we have?”

The medium hums, tapping her thin fingers against her knee, hooked over a gartered thigh. “Those aren’t your only options, darling, but they are the easiest.”

Apprehension coils cold in Erik’s gut, chasing his bones and tightening the muscles in his arms and leaving his fingers twitching. “What do you mean?” Charles asks for him.

“I can bring spirits back; bind them to their mortal body once more. In some cases,” Emma lilts, and Erik knows she’s been keeping that information from them since the beginning but it doesn’t _matter,_ because he’s sitting forward on his chair with his heart beating a million miles a minute.

“You can bring Charles back?” Incredulous, beseeching; Erik doesn’t care what’s leaking out in his desperate voice now. Emma smirks and Charles makes a soft noise next to him.

“It’s costly. It mightn’t be worth it with the sacrifices you’d have to make, and it all depends on certain circumstances, but it can be done. Before you get your hopes up, though, was the body cremated?”

“No,” Charles blurts, sitting forward with wide eyes pinned on Erik and a grin splitting his lips. Gratitude flows down Erik’s spine – gratitude towards a family not his own. “No, I wasn’t.”

Emma lists questions off the tips of her fingers. “And what about the state of the body? You died in a car crash, a month ago, yes? If you were embalmed well and buried deep, decay shouldn’t be too much of an issue, and it is nearly winter, but the more rot, the more work, the more money it takes. It also depends on the injuries sustained in the crash.”

The gratitude twists to something low and cold. Charles takes a moment to answer. “I broke my neck, in the end. I think,” he says softly. Emma hums, bringing a delicate finger up to her temple and shutting her eyes.

“You fractured your C3 vertebrae,” she recites, like she’s reading a coroner’s post-mortem, voice deep and full of gravel. “A paralysed diaphragm was the result of damaging the phrenic nerve. Herniated discs, fractures to the lumbar, fractured eye socket, as well as numerous other breaks and dislocations – you sure went out with a bang, sugar. Always wear a seatbelt.”

Emma opens her eyes, which are filled with an unnerving cloudiness that slowly dissipates. “How did you know all that?” Charles asks quietly.

“A soul is like a book. Everything that it goes through is documented in a language that I know how to read. Now, I should be able to bring you back, but what with that train-wreck of a body it won’t be cheap.”

“How much will it be?” Erik asks, but there’s a heaviness in him that just _knows._

Emma answers, blinking once, long eyelashes fanning along the tops of her cheeks for one sliver of a millisecond before she shatters Erik’s hope. “Eight thousand dollars.” She says it with the normalcy of a greeting.

“Eight _thousand_?” Charles clarifies for them, because Emma’s words have set ice cold and dead heavy in Erik’s chest and it’s a struggle enough to breathe.

“It takes so much energy to put a spirit back in its body. I’ll no doubt be bedridden with exhaustion for a month, putting me out of work. It’ll be one hell of a repair job, what with your injuries.”

It feels like his mind has been stuffed with cotton. “I don’t have that money,” is all Erik can manage, quietly, staring past Emma with something hollow in his chest.

“Do you want your boyfriend back or not?” asks Emma impatiently. Charles makes a startled noise, and Erik could correct her but the familiar cold is settling in again. He doesn’t have eight thousand dollars. He can’t bring Charles back. The moment of hope was just that; a moment, and a fallacy.

“How much is it for him to pass on?” he asks instead, with trepidation.

The medium watches him a moment. “One thousand. It’s still a lengthy and exhausting process for me, but considerably less so than if I was to bring the dead back to life.”

 _I could save up, I almost have eight grand,_ Erik thinks, even though he knows Emma is no doubt listening. _If we wait a while I can save up and afford to bring you back._

 _The longer we wait the more my body decays,_ Charles says soothingly, but even his inner voice has a waver to it he can’t control, and Erik can’t help but hear. _The more decay to the body the more it’ll cost to repair me. Plus, by the time we do have the money, I might no longer be-_ “I couldn’t ask you to do that, Erik,” is what he says, out loud.

“You didn’t ask me to let you die, either,” Erik mutters. 

“I tell you what,” Emma interrupts, unfolding her legs and pressing her knees together. “Think about it. You can call me here in a week and tell me what you’ve decided, and Charles, hopefully in that week you’ve tied off your loose ends. Then we can make the appropriate arrangements. How does that sound?”

Charles says something, and when Emma stands up Erik feels the ghost standing too, tugging lightly on the back of his coat. Just as she leads them through to the bar, Erik snaps his head up, and manages a wavering, ‘wait’. Emma quirks an eyebrow.

“What are the sacrifices you mentioned? I pay you the money, you bring him back, but what’s the catch?”

Emma’s eyelids are heavy with glittering white eye shadow, and hang low when her lips twist into a smirk. “I wasn’t sure if you’d pick up on that, but you _are_ perceptive.” Stopping only to thumb at her cuticles, Emma drawls on: “The catch is that Charles can never _be_ Charles Xavier again, because he died. Charles can never see his family or his friends, he’d have to move across the country where no one would know him, where no one would realise his body should be in a coffin. While he’d probably keep the telepathy to some degree, I wouldn’t be able to keep the bond between you two. Charles, if I bring you back, Erik won’t remember you as a ghost, he’ll only able to recollect clearly from the point just before your souls bonded, before you died. He won’t remember any of this.”

Erik bristles, something cold and _wrong_ and panicking climbing his ribs like rungs, settling in his throat. It isn’t until his fingers brush the backs of Charles’ knuckles that he realises he’s reaching for him. He’s thankful that Charles is strong enough to speak. “Why won’t he remember me?”

Emma Frost leans against the doorway with folded arms and a bored look, like this is common knowledge, like she’s explaining the Pythagoras theorem. “Half of your conscious has been threaded with Erik’s. When I’m bringing you back, I’m tearing you two apart at the seams and stuffing you, Charles, back into your own body, instead of sharing yours, Erik. The process leaves Erik a selective amnesiac and Charles alive but alone, because no one can help you get back on your feet in the mortal realm. You’re dead to everyone.”

“Will I remember him if he passes on, like he’s meant to?” is all Erik can manage for the moment. He can feel the red-skinned bouncer staring at him from the front door. 

“Yes, because by the time that Charles has completed what he’s meant to he shouldn’t be bound to you anymore. No tearing; no lost memories. You segue all neat and tidy into the next chapter of your life.”

Erik’s mouth is dry. “Right. Thanks. How much do I owe you for this?"

"Consultations are fifty dollars," she replies in a bored tone.

They leave Emma Frost and the Hellfire Club in silence, after Charles thanks her more sincerely and tells her he’ll call and Erik begrudgingly palms off a fifty bill. The rain has started up outside, and Erik walks in a reticence colder than the weather. Charles is behind him, hurrying and sticking to the walls under the shelter of the overhangs. It’s not til they’re in the car that Erik speaks.

“I’ll get the money. I’m bringing you back.”

“Erik, no-” Charles starts, but Erik slaps his palm on the dashboard so hard something cracks, plastic or bone, sanity or composure, he isn’t sure but it doesn’t matter.

“I’m bringing you back, Charles. I killed you. Let me do this.”

Whatever it is Erik’s expecting Charles to do, it isn’t for him to slap him in the face with a supernatural force.

“Erik, stop it,” Charles grits, fingers clenched in the lapel of Erik’s coat and holding him close and still. “You _need to stop_ with this killing me nonsense. You _need_ to let go of this guilt, or it’s going to kill you. I _died,_ there is _nothing_ you can do to change that; whether you spend your savings on bringing me back or not, it doesn’t change the fact that I died in that car. It’s too late.” His hands are trembling, voice warbling no matter how hard he tries to keep it stern. The rain falls in sheets across the windshield, rivulets chasing the glass and warping the view of the outside.

“Erik,” Charles continues. His fingers move to Erik’s neck. “If you’d known that I would die that night, would you have ignored my messages, or would you have driven me home?”

“I’d have driven you to the other side of the country, if you wanted,” Erik admits quietly with his eyes on Charles’ mouth. _Not like this._

“You see? You would never have intentionally let me die, and so you didn’t kill me that night. Please, Erik. Enough.” There’s something that coils around Erik’s lungs when he notices Charles’ steady blue eyes flickering down over his face – down, down past his nose, but not past his chin. His breath is white as Emma Frost’s skirt in the chilled space between them, which is losing inches as time creeps on. _Not like this._ Erik _doesn’t_ have feelings for Charles because he _can’t_ have feelings for him – Charles is _dead._ And yet…

“You’re right,” he croaks, pulling back to his own seat and stretching his neck against the headrest. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Charles soothes gently, folding his hands neatly in his lap. Erik notices he has round, bitten-down nails. “Just no more guilt, please. If you feel guilty then I feel guilty, and I’m selfish so I don’t want to feel bad, ever,” he jokes lightly. Erik starts the car, and he feels warm even with the storm outside and the cold metal surrounding them. The heater doesn’t kick in til they’re half an hour on the freeway back home.

*

Erik’s shift finishes at eight, and Charles is buzzing with happiness in the seat next to him as Erik drives them back from the library, the last dregs of rain spitting on the windows and sluicing down the glass. Where Erik had stood straight holding onto his book trolley, Charles had been leaning on the front counter, dragging his hands down his face, and pacing around the lobby as he rattled off question after question for Erik to ask a slightly apprehensive Armando about the relationship of his partner’s kid brother just before Erik was due to clock off. The fact that Erik had delivered these questions with a blasé tone and a face stoic as stone probably hadn’t eased Armando’s uneasy frown, but Erik isn’t paid to placate.

“I didn’t know you were so interested in the whole Scott-Jean-Logan saga,” Armando had chuckled nervously when he’d finished recounting every tiny detail he knew, everything that Charles could weed out via Erik’s flat drawl.

“They’re all anyone talks about at school,” Erik had told him, trying to keep the weariness out of his tone. “Thanks for the inside scoop.”

Charles had practically shouted.

Now his happiness is intoxicating, rolling off him and filling Erik’s senses. He’s glad for the emotional distraction.

While he’s content with driving in silence, and doesn’t particularly want to remember back to the Hellfire Club and all of Emma’s knowing smirks, Erik knows he has to bring it up eventually. A few streets from home, he asks, “So, what do you think it is you need to do to move on?”

Charles sits in pondering silence for a minute, but there’s still a light buzz at the back of Erik’s neck so he isn’t too worried. Charles speaks slowly, considering and mulling over his words. “I think it’s something to do with Raven. I think- well, I know, our stepfather has probably commandeered my trust fund, and I’m quite sure he’s sent Raven off to live with distant family overseas, to keep her out of the way. That way he can weasel his way into accounts as he pleases, and with my mother being in a near perpetual state of inebriation, she won’t complain so long as someone buys her her liquor.”

Erik let’s it all sink in. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

The buzz simmers, even as Charles smiles at him. “I wanted to have hope Raven was still here. Plus I- I know how you think of me, Erik.” There’s a smart of panic that freezes Erik’s fingers in a tight cramp around the steering wheel, but then Charles continues. “I know you think I’m stuck up and audacious, and that I could never have any problems whatsoever because I could buy my way out of any predicament. But no matter how much old money you’ve got tucked away, you can’t pay people to forget the illegitimacy of your little sister. Love counts for naught if you don’t share the same blood. Raven has been ostracised ever since our father died, and I was the string that kept her tied to the family, and kept the family civil towards her. Now I’m gone, her blood is nothing, and if she’s not been at school or online in the past month, all I can think is that she’s been holed away. Plus, it’s not like Kurt never threatened to do this to her before.”

An apology laced with _I never knew_ is what flickers through Erik’s mind, and he knows Charles hears it so he continues steadily. “How are we going to find her?”

“Tomorrow, when you go to school, I’m going to try and snoop through the office computers to find her transfer files. If they’re there, I have no doubt Kurt’s moved her. From that it shouldn’t be hard for me to narrow down which cousin she’s staying with, and then… then I’m going to take care of her. I’ll open a new account for her, one that Kurt can’t touch, and empty my trust fund and her own into that… I, I think that’s what I have to do. I’m sure of it.”

Erik wants to sigh, roll his eyes, complain that _he’s_ going to have to assist in all this because Charles can’t get around without him. But he can’t. He can’t even pretend to be irritated. “How will you know that you’re free to pass on after that?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to find out.”

That night, before Erik crawls into bed Charles vanishes with his laptop and a determination to find his sister. It takes him longer to fall asleep than he’d like to admit, because admission means registering all the hours that blurred together and got lost up in his thoughts, thoughts about _Charles_.

A day ago Erik couldn’t wait for Charles to move on, but now… now, something’s changed, and he isn’t quite sure what he wants anymore. 

* * *

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for: a little bit of violence.
> 
> Chapters will be Hella Long and Hella Serious from now on, aha.

When Charles appears next to him at lunch break the following day, Erik nearly inhales his sandwich, and after he splutters he throws his fist into Charles’ shoulder and regrets it instantaneously when a first year gives him a quizzical look.

“Sorry,” Charles titters. Erik doubts it.

“What did you find?” he grumbles from the corner of his mouth, glaring out across the courtyard.

"I found Raven's file in the school system, and she _has_ been transferred, to a girl’s school about two hours east of here. I'm sure she's staying with our great Aunt, unless she's boarding." Charles sounds happier than Erik's ever heard him. "Are you up for another road trip?"

"Day after tomorrow's Saturday; I have work," is Erik’s laconic reply. He pointedly stares straight across the courtyard because he can _feel_ Charles' lucent, pleading eyes boring into the side of his head. “Stop it. What’s to say she would even believe me when I try to tell her you’re still here? We talked this over when you came back.”

“We have to try,” Charles starts imploringly. “I have to say goodbye to her, and make sure she’s safe and well and all that, and then I can pass on. She _has_ to believe you, because what else could be keeping me here?” Something shifts in Erik’s chest, and he _prays_ Charles doesn’t feel it as well.

With a weary sigh, a solemn bite of his sandwich, and a defeated swallow, Erik acquiesces. “I can ask Sean if he’ll cover for me.”

Erik sees stars in Charles’ eyes when he finally looks at him, and it makes him feel sick. “Thank you so much, Erik,” Charles blurts effusively, grabbing Erik’s arm with both hands and inadvertently pulling him into his space. Erik pretends not to notice the proximity.

“It’s okay,” he mumbles meekly. Moments pass before Charles lets go of him, off on a tangent about something Erik can hardly follow, mind stuck on the tingling under the skin of his bicep.

“...school, can we go to the bank? Erik…?”

“What?” he snaps with a frown. “Wait, to sort out Raven’s account?”

“Yes,” Charles replies slowly. “So I can transfer my trust fund to her." 

“Because that doesn’t sound at all illegal,” Erik lilts sarcastically. “Do you even know how to manage that?”

“I don’t have to,” Charles huffs. “I’ll just influence the teller; put the information and the directive in their mind, oversee the whole thing, and then stroll back out. You won’t even have to leave your bike if you wait close enough.”

Erik’s skeptical, eying Charles steadily and biting the inside of his lip. “If I get sent to jail for this, you’re going to be coming with me, you know.” Charles just laughs, a clear, easy sound that sits well Erik’s chest 

The warmth throbs away slowly and lulls Erik through the last two periods of the day. The bell rings just as Erik notices Charles smiling gently at him. Smiling back spikes something inside him, and he thinks he knows what this is. He thinks Charles just might know, too.

*

Even though Erik is sitting on his bike out on the footpath, metres from the bank, and even though Charles is quelling his anxieties while giving him periodic updates on how he’s going, apprehension is still the reason why Erik bites at his nails while restlessness jitters his right knee.

He flicks through his phone to assuage suspicion: a teen poised and ready to cycle away from the front entrance of a bank isn’t exactly a neutral scenario. Pretending to be engrossed in the digital world, at least now Erik doesn’t have to see the cursory and cagey glances he’s garnering from passers-by, and maybe, _maybe_ someone will think he’s just loitering, instead of assuming he’s the getaway for a bank heist and _God,_ Charles is so _frustrating_ , his sister had better be worth it-  
  
_She is,_ filters resolutely into Erik’s mind. He all but gnaws a layer of skin from his lip. _I'll be done in a moment_.

Erik has beaten two levels of his game by the time Charles emerges, crumpling something into the pocket of his jeans, but Erik's too edgy to care much. "All done," Charles tells him, scooting himself onto the back of the bike and looping his arms around Erik's stomach. "Thank you for this, Erik," he says, soft and warm. Erik hadn't realised how close Charles' mouth was.

"It's all right," he utters, awkwardly kicking off and starting down the road. The wind is blissfully refreshing on his heated face.

*

" _Sorry, no can do, amigo, I'm booked; I even got Saturday off in the_ n.a. _log._ "

"I can take any of your night shifts for the week. Please, Sean, there's no one else I can ask."

" _I'm sorry, dude; I've got a date. I wish I could help you out, but..._ "

Erik sighs, looking at Charles and shaking his head minutely. "No, that's okay," he says into the phone. "Thanks, anyway. Did Moira finally give in?"

Erik doesn't even need to see the redhead to know he's got a cheesy grin splitting his mouth. " _Yeah, man. Couldn’t resist my wiles. We're gonna go to lunch and then catch a flick_."

"It only took three months," Erik jokes. "Have fun."

Charles sighs loudly when Erik hangs up, flopping back onto the bed dramatically. "It's okay," he says finally, staring at the ceiling. He has a curl of hair sticking up near his forehead that makes Erik’s hand itch. "We can see Raven on Sunday maybe?"

“Would she come here? If I messaged her and asked?”

“She lives an two hours away, Erik,” Charles laments, casting his arms out over the quilt. Erik sits down at the desk purposefully, rooting through his satchel for his homework, and definitely, _definitely not_ looking at Charles spread out on his bed, at the sliver of skin between the hem of his ridden-up shirt and the fly of his jeans.

“It’s worth a try. I could ask her to meet me at the library on Saturday. Tell her it’s important.”

“She wouldn’t come; she’s skeptical and stubborn. Sort of like you.”

Erik ignores that. “Tell me what I should tell _her_ that’ll make her come. Think up something you know will intrigue or entice her. You’re her brother.”

He catches the tail end of a thought that Charles must have accidentally projected, something that sounds like _didn’t entice you._ Erik ignores that, too.

After twenty minutes of quiet filled with the flicking of textbook pages and the scratch of black biro on cheap paper, Charles sighs excessively and rolls onto his side, staring at Erik from the pillow.

“Have you thought of what I should send her?” Erik asks sharply, not looking away from his notebook.

“I’m terribly bored,” is all Charles says. “Can we see a film?”

Erik tries not to snort. “At the cinema? I don’t think so.” 

“But why not?”

Erik looks up at him in a deadpan. “It’s expensive.”  
  
“You’ll only have to pay for one,” the ghost tries to plead.  
  
“You’re the one robbing banks, you can fund this expedition. How _did_ you manage that, by the way?”  
  
Charles looks at him pointedly for his accusation. “I opened Raven a new, separate account, transferred my funds over before closing my own account, and dated and signed it all for a few days before I died. Very easy. Can we go to the cinema?” 

“And what am I telling your sister?"

Charles quiets a moment, eyes lost somewhere past Erik as he mulls over his words. “Just say, ‘it’s to do with Charles and Mystique.'"

“Mystique?”

“Name of her cat when Raven was young.”

With a nod, Erik commits it to memory before pulling out his phone. “What movie are we seeing?”

 *

They see some primed up comedy that had executed its funniest gag ten minutes in, one that makes Erik’s eyes drier than his mouth when Charles leans up on him. It’s hard to distinguish whether Charles is snorting at Erik’s mental quips and commentaries or the exasperating extent to which the stale jokes are being dragged out. Either way, the soft puffs of air on his shoulder are making the hairs on his neck stand on end.

Erik would be a liar to blame solely their proximity for making everything inside him tight. He knows it's more than that, knows that whatever it is has been a long time coming, this electricity between them. One day, it's going to spark and ignite something. One day. Erik prays with everything it doesn't.

There's an ever present softness at the back of his mind thrumming gently that lulls him back from the stress and anger and guilt now, that pulls him back even when Charles isn’t around; one that powers him through class and motivates him at work and smooths his eyes shut at night. It's calming, and yet simultaneously it feels like he’s had too much coffee, or stayed up all night, or gotten stuck teetering between fight or flight in a vacillating mess of adrenaline, enthusiasm, and spontaneity. Soft but heavy, it pulses away at the top of his neck, making his muscles shiver and his skin gooseflesh. The tether between himself and Charles is such a peculiar, intrinsic thing, something he’s accustomed to as if it where his own heartbeat.

Erik tries not to dwell on the cavity that’ll be left in his head and his heart when it’s gone. 

When Emma Frost sinks her long, white fingernails into the heartbeat of Charles’ soul and tears it from Erik’s mind.  
  
He notices when Charles stops huffing his light, breathy laughter.

*

For the first time after four weeks Friday doesn’t loom over Erik, pressing down on his shoulders and making him choke, however the temporary, minute relief isn’t shared. Charles is staring longingly out the window when Erik wakes, before the ghost glances over at him with a quiet smile as the perennial glow leaks into Erik’s mind from his own. Howbeit, there’s an opalescence in his eyes and a pallid hue to his skin that Charles can’t shake and Erik can’t bring up. Instead Erik’s musters a sad, knowing smile, touching Charles’ frozen hand as he walks past him to the closet, but nothing more.

After all, what empty words could offer solace for irreparable neck fractures and broken backs. It would be crass to try. 

School is sombre, like Erik always finds it is on Fridays, students and teachers unanimous in their grieving. There’s an unspoken leniency towards late homework or listlessness during class, an understanding when someone goes quiet and stares off into nothing. It’s forgiven; it’s ubiquitous. 

Charles filters in and out of Erik’s day. Bound together like they are, time alone is always welcomed, and when Erik sees the ghost sitting next to Jean in the classroom across the hall, it fills something up in him that the depression takes away. 

Charles sits with his friends during lunch, too, laughing along with their quiet jokes and leaning into their conversations. Erik watches him from across the courtyard, slowly chewing his bland sandwich and despite it all, feeling like things are _normal._ Like this is just any other day, and Xavier is sat with his posse, confident in his milieu, ignoring him and annoying him, the way things should be. He would be listening with rapture to an animated retelling of one of Jean’s dates with Scott; laughing along with Kitty as she'd recount what one of the first years in her support group did with fire crackers in the mall this week; giving a cursory glance accompanied by toothy grin over at Erik as he'd throw glares from behind his glasses and read broodily on his own.  
  
Six weeks ago this would have been reality. Six weeks, this wouldn’t have been a fantasy Erik would give _anything_ to make real. There’s nothing he can do to change things now, however. Time trudges along, dragging Erik in its clutches and thrusting him into each new day, no matter how much he hates it, no matter how reluctant he is. All he can do to fight it is take its date and give time a name, narrowing it down to a milestone, to the only thing that matters:  
  
_Five weeks since Charles Xavier died._

Friday started good for the first time in a month. It steadily shifts into the old, hopeless shell of a day Erik knows so well when Raven finally messages him back.

 _Raven Xavier:_  
fuck off. i don’t know what you’re playing at but this isn’t funny. don’t message me again.  
[13:07]  
  
When he looks up again at Charles, he feels sick.

He has no idea what to tell him.

*

Having a telepathic bond it isn’t long before Charles overhears Erik’s cacophony of anxious thoughts about the message. When he does, it’s in fifth period, and Charles nods, or maybe just ducks his head down so Erik won’t see the red around his eyes or the angry tears filling them, even though Erik needn’t see him crying to _feel_ his upset. Then he vanishes, completely dissipating and reforming as a heaviness in Erik’s head and a blackness behind his peripherals, nothing more than he was a week ago - a chill in his spine; a headache behind his eyes.

 _I'll try again_ , Erik thinks determinedly. _I'll message her again, Charles, I'll get Hank to message her asking her here, I'll do anything_. None of his coaxing works.

Something's different, though. It's different to the times Charles slinks away to give Erik space. It doesn't feel like before either, though, when every breath he took was laced with regret and made his lungs black and heavy; when he wasn't sure if he'd blink and see blood, swelling and swarming and cascading down the walls and coming to drown him; when his skin felt dead and cold and his head pounded with another's rage. It feels worse. It feels out of control-

Shattering, smashing, in quick succession; people screaming under a sudden shower of glass. Erik frantically pulls his notebook over his head, ducking down low and scanning the room. The windows along the hall side of the room have been blown out, with jagged, gaping holes left in the frames. Across the corridor a teacher is yelling and more people are screaming and shouting. 

"Get down on the floor, stay calm," his teacher shouts, and in the scuffle to get on the floor desks and chairs fall on their sides. The shrill crash of falling glass echoes down the hall as windows crack and shatter one by one, and Erik knows, he _knows_ what's happening because he _feels_ the same pulsing rage that's behind it. 

Shards of glass slice into his hands as Erik crawls between tables to get to the doorway unnoticed. The school lockdown alarm starts its resounding whining, and Erik honestly can't tell if that's Charles as well. A girl is screaming with blood running down her face and caking in her hair next to him, and Erik feels the slithers of glass embedding themselves further and further into his palms as he drags himself out of the cacophony.

"Get back here!" his teacher bellows as he reaches the doorway. Erik hadn't even heard him.

Sprinting down the corridor as the windows shatter, it's the same scenario in every classroom that he glances in: students with glass stuck in skin and muscle, blood dribbling down their faces and necks, teachers trying to shout over the discord.

There's no time to see if people are okay or need help now. As it is, pain and rage are making Erik's eyes swim and his surroundings tilt dangerously. The last windows are blown out into their rooms, and then Erik sees him, sees Charles standing with his arms spread out and eyes black, glaring straight at him.

With aching legs Erik charges straight for him, slamming him into the wall, and despite the glass in his hands he scrambles to find enough purchase on Charles' body to hold him down. "Charles!" he yells, slamming his shoulders into the brickwork and staring into his dead, black eyes. "Snap out of this!" Slowly, Charles’ hand slides up his side to Erik’s chest- and then all it takes is a slight push and he's flying across the space, cracking high up on the opposite wall and crumpling into a heap on the floor

Everything stops. He’s going to throw up, or scream, or both, but the air has been knocked too forcefully from his lungs. Something is broken, something is badly broken in his arm or his chest or his neck, pain spiking and setting fire to his muscles, but he ignores it because _he has to_ , because Charles has lost himself and is dragging the whole school down into his madness. Pulling himself to his feet with a shrill ringing hammering in his ears and blood filling his mouth, Erik tries again, lunging at Charles and pinning him to the wall with a cry.

"Come back," he spits, blood spraying over his lips and inching down his neck in thick tendrils. The glass in his hands is wedged deeper when he pins Charles' wrists above his head, pressing his chest heavily to the ghost's and twisting to thrust his hip into his gut. When he thrashes and twists in Erik's grip, Erik leans heavier into him using all his weight to keep him pressed on the wall. Charles' rattling breaths fill his mouth, their faces almost touching, and Erik bores into the empty wells of Charles' eyes with a painful determination. "Come back," he rasps again, quieter. "Come back, Charles." _Come back to me_. 

The black filling Charles' eyes recedes slowly, trickling back into his pupils. His breaths turn into gasps, and when Erik slams his shoulders back on the wall again and squeezes his wrists tighter the ghost whines, turning his head and thrashing in his grip. Erik’s blood seeps down Charles’ forearms, matting in the woollen sleeves of his cardigan. "Come back to me, Charles. Come back to me."

With a strangled scream Charles writhes out of Erik's grip, blood lubricating his skin slippery. It takes all Erik's waning strength to throw himself on Charles and tumble them to the floor, slamming him to the carpet and squeezing his sides with his knees. 

His ribs dissent when he moves, leaning forward and bracing himself on Charles’ shoulders, skin tight and stinging, pain stealing his breath. “Charles, I know you’re in there.” Blood streaks up his neck in messy jags as Erik strokes shakily up to Charles chin, cupping his cheek and ducking his head down, letting his body lax and roll with Charles’ writhing. He presses his bloody, sweaty forehead to Charles’, blood drying in their hair, grinding his teeth and forcing his eyes open against the pain, against the soul-sucking and wild way Charles is glaring at him with those lost eyes. “ _Please_ ,” Erik emanates with his mind and his mouth. “Please come back to me.”

Charles screams one last time, and then the tremors stop. “ _Erik,_ ” Charles finally rasps, clawing at Erik’s jaw and neck like he’s drowning in the blackness seeping from his mind. “Oh, God, what did I do- _Erik,_ help me-” 

“It’s okay.” Erik can barely manage a whisper against his mouth anymore, breath thin and throat closing with pain, and God, not like this, not like this, but he _wants_ it, wants it anyway he can get it because Emma’s words are coming back to him and they don’t have any more time, Charles has just had his first attack, it’s _too late-_ “You’ve come back to me, but we need to get out.” The adrenaline is thinning in his blood, which is still spilling out the gashes in his hands and causing caked knots in Charles’ hair as Erik cards his shaking fingers through the sweaty mess. Behind them, a door creaks open, a hundred eyes watching him from the glassless windows, and Erik can hear boots stomping down the corridor towards them. “We seriously have to go.”

“Okay,” Charles whispers, pushing Erik up only to grip his arms and scan his face when he cries out sharply as the fractures and tears jostle. “What is it? What’s wrong, Erik?!”  
  
_Everything,_ is what first comes to mind and a choked sound is what first comes out his mouth, followed by a slur and a moan, and then the heaviness of sleep casts its shadows over everything. _No, no_ comes in a panic not his own, and belatedly his cheek stings as Charles slaps him back into consciousness.

“... can’t fix you here, we have to get up- can you get up for me? Come on…” Erik nearly passes out again from the hot, red pain blooming in his chest and up his arm as Charles heaves him up, wincing himself as he does. Something cold and numb trickles from his neck down his spine, offering relief so cool and gentle and desired that Erik hardly minds the intrusion. “Just a little bit farther,” Charles is gasping through his teeth and their shared pain, all but dragging Erik out to the bike racks. “Just a little bit more.”

Erik hardly remembers Charles hauling him onto the back of the bike, fixing his legs into a straddle, or looping his arms around Charles’ chest securely as the ghost hastily kicked them off down the road. He can’t recollect how Charles managed to get them to the park with no one noticing, the only thing linking the blank spaces together is the stream of Charles’ consciousness: _hurry; keep him awake; parents are home; avert attention; keep him_ awake. What he can recall is thinking that the grass is inexplicably soft when Charles drags him down from the bike and lays him flat, that constant, uninhibited babble of Charles’ thoughts like static in his head muffling the outside world. _Sleep now; oh God what am I doing; oh God what have I_ done; _go to sleep Erik, we’re safe now; I’m so sorry._

*

There’s fingers in Erik’s hair when he wakes the first time, pushing his sweaty fringe back from his forehead and combing the knots away with little murmurs and mutters. His vision is sluggish to focus, blurring Charles into something close but undefinable. Leaning over him, he’s whispering something Erik can’t pick up, and with a stroke of his hand he’s under again. 

The second time he wakes, there’s a weight on his chest, right under his sternum and brown and soft he finds, when he looks down and strokes a hand over Charles’ head. “Erik,” Charles whimpers brokenly, lifting his head to inspect the other boy. “I’m so glad.” _So sorry._

His mouth is dry, every breath filled with ash that makes his throat burn, and words get trapped in the fire. Projecting isn’t much easier through the mush of his brain, thoughts elongated and tapering off into a drowsy nothing. He manages enough, though, because it could be seconds or minutes or months later but Charles procures a glass of water and helps him up in the bed, holding the glass to his mouth. Despite it all, nothing hurts as much as it should, as much as it had before.

“You got us home,” Erik rasps eventually, lifting his hand to Charles’ chin. He whimpers again, nuzzling into Erik’s palm. Erik's blood isn't staining his clothes anymore.

“Your parents are home. I had to- I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have to.”

Erik hums, rubbing his knuckles along Charles’ mouth. The anger is sluggish and fizzles into nothing within seconds. “You fixed me.”

Charles nods, eyes screwed shut in shame. “I fixed you.” _After I’d nearly killed you._ “I sent your parents to the cinema. You made dinner while they were out. You studied before retiring for the night.”  
  
“What time is it now?" 

“It’s ten.”  
  
Erik considers this. “That’s bit late. I’ve been out for a while.”  
  
Charles’ voice wavers, and he speaks slowly, trying to control himself. “You had a lot of injuries.”  
  
“You fixed me,” Erik reiterates, as strong as he can with a croaky throat and fresh ribs. His fingers dance along Charles’ face, clumsy but gentle, catching on his lips and eyes as he tries to smooth the grimace away. “Are you all right, Charles?”

And then Charles cries, finally, a month and a week after he died, he cries into Erik’s palm with tears like icicles and lips soft as snow. His fingers claw in Erik’s shirt, in the sheets pooling around his waist, in Erik’s hair as he holds his chin. Grieving through his grit teeth, he chokes and coughs and splutters and sobs, and it cracks through Erik’s fatigue in the worst way, making him keenly aware of the way Charles’ pain seeps into him and fills him up with guilt and loss. “Where did I go?” Charles warbles, over and over, clutching Erik’s wrist. “Where did I _go,_ Erik?!”

He can’t answer.

 _I’m so cold, I’m so cold, I don't want to be cold, I want to wake up now._ The litany fills Erik’s head on accident with Charles’ sobs filling the room until it all gets too much for Erik to handle. He’s only in his underwear, he finds when he slides out of bed on wobbling legs, but it doesn’t matter. Charles is perched on the edge, and with some coaxing Erik manages to shift him over, despite his protests, despite his tears. Clambering out into the hall and stumbling a little on his way to the linen closet, Erik scoops blankets into his arms and checks to see his parents are asleep before hurrying back into his room. Charles is sniffling now, watching him in the doorway before Erik stalks over and dumps the blankets on the bed.

“Come on. Move over,” Erik chides gently, thumbing his lamp off and crawling back into bed.

“What- what are you doing?” Charles hiccups, backing up against the wall with a wariness in his red eyes that Erik huffs at. 

“You need rest. We both used a lot of energy today.” How he manages to keep calm and complacent is a miracle that only Emma Frost could understand, but he pulls the duvet up to Charles’ shoulder and heaves the scratchy woollen blankets onto his side of the bed. Erik can’t say what he means, but a shaky _okay_ , wisps into his mind anyway, and Charles slowly lays flat, mind quiet and face wet. 

It’s a tight squeeze in the tiny bed, with Charles pressed between the wall and Erik’s bare chest, the quilt wrapped behind his back. Sharing the same pillow, their faces are centimetres apart, lips dangerously close and noses brushing. Erik’s so aware of his hot breath on Charles’ mouth, especially since his is the only air in their space – until Charles lets out a shuddering sigh he’s held on to for far too long, followed by a weak noise that slips out of his throat.

 _Not like this._ He can feel Charles’ arm coming up over his waist, while his own arms are awkwardly at his sides, and he can feel the one under him start to tingle and die. “Hold me?” Charles mumbles, and Erik can _feel_ his words: tangible and thick, slipping into his mouth and sitting heavily on his tongue. Charles’ nose slides under Erik’s, and Erik moves into a wet patch on the pillowcase, the cold biting. Not like this, not with Charles weeping in his bed and wetting his pillow – but Erik can’t help himself anymore. Charles has already started to slip away from him. Who knows how long they have left. 

“Of course,” he concedes gently, arm coming up to droop over Charles’ side, the other snaking under the pillow. “Is it okay if I have my leg like – this?” he asks as he pushes his knee between Charles’ shins. He’s so short, yet Erik had never realised how broad he was, lying next to him like this. “You should warm up quick enough.” He can feel cold fingers pressing on his chest, and he tries not to choke when Charles rubs up against him. _Not like this_.

“I want to be alive,” Charles murmurs into his cheek. “I was so scared, I was _so scared._ Erik, I don’t want to be dead. _I don’t want to be dead_. I want to see Raven, and my mum, and you, _Erik-_ “ He starts up again, and his words get lost in his throat and drowned in tears, sluicing down his pale cheeks and landing on Erik’s lips when he kisses his face softly. It’s an accident - as much as Erik wants to kiss the sobs from his mouth, it’s an accident. Not like this, Erik won’t kiss Charles like this, crying and weak and vulnerable, won’t pry his fingers into the crack in that gregarious, persistent, charming, benevolent personality. Erik will soothe, to the best of his ability. He won't take. He manages to convince himself he's being selfless.

He runs his fingers up into Charles’ hair and scratches gently at his scalp. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise. I’m going to stay right here; tonight, tomorrow, next week, next month, if you need. Whatever you need.” Chest to chest, he can feel the hiccups chasing up Charles’ throat and the hyperventilating that’s threatening to break through his grit teeth. “I’m so sorry, Charles. I don’t want to you to be dead, either,” Erik whispers, and it’s the final jagged crack in Charles’ already shattered facade. The days of teasing and joking and smiling at Erik’s side mean nothing suddenly, and that cuts deeply into something under Erik’s sternum.

Moments pass that could be minutes or hours, could be days or years, an ambiguous flow of time that gets wound up around them. It takes a while, but eventually Charles quiets, the heartbroken cries dwindling down to quick sucks and sniffles and a solid shuddering against Erik’s chest. Charles is tucked under Erik’s chin, and he’s not quite sure when the ghost wriggled down like that, but Erik’s glad because now he doesn’t have to think about _not_ kissing Charles like he wants to so much. Erik is stroking up Charles’ back and carding his fingers through his damp hair when Charles breaks the silence.

“I’m really dead, aren’t I, Erik?" 

“I wish with everything that you weren’t.” 

“Emma said she could bring me back.”

It’s what Erik’s been ignoring for days now; saying it out loud stings his eyes and makes something in his throat tight. He’s not allowed to be that selfish. “You could never see your family. You could never see Raven, and I wouldn’t remember you. You’d be across the country and we’d never meet. You’d have to change your name, how you look, everything.”

“But I’d be alive,” Charles murmurs against the hollow in his neck. “This time five weeks ago I was dying in the main street intersection. But I could come back.”

_Would you keep him for yourself?_

Erik can’t swallow, can’t talk around the dry lump in his throat, but words tumble out weak and irresolute regardless. He doesn’t mean them at all, and they both know it. “You need to pass on. You know you do. You’ve been stuck here for over a month, and look what happened today; you don’t have long.”

It’s sharp and cutting and shuts Charles up enough that he stops putting stupid fantasies in Erik’s head. Despite himself, he still holds Charles close, getting hair in his mouth and his nose and eyes. “Is this helping?” Erik asks, instantly regretting it when Charles looses a muffled yet knocked down, ‘yes.’ 

_He couldn’t ever-- this will only end messily._

Erik pays no attention to the tense ambience around them, instead struggling to keep himself from relishing in the way Charles molds around him like water filling all his gaps, and at some point Erik’s hands sneak up under his shirt his fingers splay over the cold rungs of his spine. Erik’s never been intimate with another, barely thinks his friendships count because they’re all work-based. Almost touch starved, holding Charles is nearly overwhelming, and it takes everything not to gasp when Charles shifts their bodies just so. There’s no point pretending his heart isn’t hammering so hard in his chest that Charles can’t feel it, body to body in the cramped single bed, but Erik will ignore it regardless. He _can’t_ and he _won’t_ give in _,_ no matter how many times Charles falls into the black and breaks Erik’s body and brings him back. No matter how cold or how dead or how in love Charles is. He’ll savour the way it feels to be held by another, but he won’t fall in. It’d be too selfish; and too self-destroying.

He used to have so much more self-control, but that was back when everything was different and he thought he knew he’d never have a chance with Charles. Erik has half a mind to tell himself not to get used to this, because it’ll never last, never work out; Charles is _dead dead dead,_ it’s _ridiculous,_ it's  _impossible_. Despite it all, despite how much he berates and reasons and denies himself, with Charles flush against his body, he can’t stop from accepting for an infinitesimal, accidental moment how perfect this feels, how right, and can’t help it when he realises how he’d give _anything_ to keep Charles warm in his arms every night. 

“Can you sleep?” he murmurs into the awkward space, brushing the wafting tresses of Charles’ wild hair neat behind his ears. Ducked down as he is Erik can’t see his face, but he needn’t to feel the emotion displayed there.

“I wish I could,” Charles confesses to Erik’s collar. “Tearing you apart and putting you back together rather drained me. You should sleep, though.”

“And leave you lonely?” 

Charles doesn’t respond for too long a time, and Erik only just hears his words as sleep pulls his sore eyes shut. “I’ll have to get used to the loneliness, if I am to pass into a realm without you.”

Charles wakes him in the morning with gentle words and hands in his hair. The curtains have been pulled aside only just, letting in the world’s warm beckon, even though Charles’ arms remain secure around Erik’s chest with his head on Erik’s pillow. Erik’s own arms are tight encircling Charles’ waist, their legs an indistinguishable tangle that isn’t uncomfortable.  “I thought you could wake without that shrill thing, for once,” he reasons with a slight nod, nowhere near being close to directed at Erik’s cell on the stand but succeeding in dragging their noses across one another and their foreheads close. 

“Thank you,” says Erik softly. _This is far nicer by comparison._ “I’m sorry; my breath is probably terrible. Don’t breathe.”

When Charles laughs it’s a genuine thing that’s clear and bright and starts a trickle in Erik’s chest. “A challenging feat for me, I’m sure.”

The trickle chases along smelted seams in Erik’s chest and withers them down into open cracks, letting in the light; inhibitions lost in the sunbeams and mind as welcoming to Charles as the day. “I could stay with you like this til evening.”

“Let it happen, Erik,” Charles murmurs beseechingly, hand heavy on his cheek.

“I can’t.” Then, louder, after their gaze has been broken by the intrigue of the wall behind Charles’ head, “Armando would end me,” Erik covers, disentangling limb from limb and mind from mind. “I have to get ready for work.”

*

Charles is constantly lingering in his vision at the library; tailing him around, hefting books into their place and listening attentively as Erik mentally explains to him the Dewey decimal system, a method which Charles had never really paid much mind to. When he’d said this, Erik had simply covered his mouth lest something definitely abhorred and definitely insulting to Charles’ intelligence slip out _oh so accidentally._ At least it explained why Erik sometimes found a science tome Charles had lugged out haphazardly slotted onto the shelf of murder mysteries an aisle over, back when he’d been alive.

This thing between them, the thing that changed when Erik held Charles as he cried through his fear and Charles clung to Erik with the intention to pry him open, Erik ignores it now, instead focusing on chiding the other. He isn’t ignorant to the broken way Charles looks at him, how his pallor dulls and eyes sull when Erik smiles at him like they’ve just graduated from enemies to friends, nothing more, but he pretends he can’t see it, can’t feel Charles’ disappointment in him. Any progression of their mental conversation into territories guarded by Erik is easy enough to rectify, and Charles is malleable, forgiving and coaxing and gentle by nature. He gets what he wants from people, but in their time, and they both know this, know the inevitability of it all, but for now he lets Erik childishly avoid the issue. Erik thinks it’s a good thing he is stubborn enough for the both of them.

Yesterday, last night and this morning is a collective of time easy enough to ignore until, right after Erik comes back from his break, two girls chittering at a table stop to glare at him. They’re from school, Erik realises with a cold spike, and Charles stills and quiets beside him.

Stubborn ignorance is Erik’s niche. He wheels his cart by them, leaving Charles to hurry to follow. Even Hank gives him a peculiar look when he passes, but quickly hides it in a book and throws no further glances. Erik Lehnsherr: Charles Xavier’s least favourite person in school and vice versa, beating drunk drivers and hanging around graveyards and throwing himself around the hallway in the Human Society block, screaming Charles’ name.

Of course the whole school is keeping tabs now.

Annoyance crackles at the base of Erik’s skull and in the tips of his drumming fingers, peaking when he opens the drop box and finds its brimming. Charles helps him as much as he can, passing books over for scanning when no one is looking to see it either mysteriously vanish in his paranormal grip or simply levitate mid-air. He makes a startled noise and drops the book back into the teeming basket in a sudden jerk, one that garners Erik’s attention in a glance over his shoulder. ‘ _Phantom Fornication: Sexual Encounters with the Supernatural’_ blazes in blocky white text over the cover, and Erik quickly looks down at his hands. The annoyance twists into something tight below his gut.  

He ignores that, too. Ignores the way even adult regulars regard him with their twisted lips and disapproving brows, ignores the knowing heaviness that sits in Armando’s eyes whenever his boss looks at him. He’ll disregard the entire damn town _and_ Charles if he has to, if that’s what keeps him safe and sane, no matter how much it hurts. 

Armando lets him off shift early when he nearly snaps at a kid from the neighbouring town for nothing more than a throwaway glance, and in the back room Charles circles his arms around Erik’s hips and pulls himself close, pressing his cheek to Erik’s chest. It takes everything Erik has not to relent and rest his chin on the top of Charles’ messy hair. “Don’t think about them,” he tells him. “They don’t know anything. They don’t know you saved me.”

“Don’t,” Erik starts, gritting his teeth. “Don’t say that.”

“You saved me yesterday. You’re saving me now,” Charles presses anyway, holding him tighter. “Let’s get home. We can watch a movie.” 

In the car, Charles is clingier than normal, sitting sideways with his feet in Erik’s lap as he drives and a ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ kind of look in his eyes. Thinking retrospectively, Charles stuck around for what lasted of Erik’s shift where he would usually vanish somewhere to read or to people-watch alone. The brushes of fingers as he passed books, palms at the small of his back - they were rather uncharacteristic, too. Erik supposes that while he can plough through the struggle of disregarding yesterday, it’s put Charles on the brink of something just as dangerous as what had consumed.

“I’m sorry I was a dick today,” he concedes with a sigh, pulling up to the curb of his home after a silent ten minute drive. 

“I understand, and I forgive you,” Charles murmurs. “Shall we see what terrible day soaps are on at one p.m. on Saturdays?”

Charles lets him lean on him when they settle into the couch later on, after Erik has changed, stared his reflection down, and told himself to just be calm because he isn't worth Charles' love and Charles _isn't_ worth the heartache. His self-derogatory speech works little, though, because when Charles wraps his arm around Erik’s trim waist he can hardly find the effort to care.

“You’re home early,” Edie remarks brightly after she dumps bags of groceries on the table later. Erik wonders if she found out about school yet, if they’d called her. Charles would have probably dealt with that, flexing his coercive telepathy and convincing Edie to ignore the trilling of the landline. “You were okay last night?”

On his second attempt to speak, Erik manages to get out a, “Yeah. Do you need any help with that?”

Following him to the pantry, holding onto the back of his shirt, gripping his hand when he can; Charles is quiet, hardly speaking a word as he tails and touches Erik the whole afternoon. Maybe he thinks it’s easier like this, easier on Erik; maybe he’s too scared of what’ll be blurted out on accident if he opens his mouth instead of trying to communicate with gentle touching. Charles sits for dinner with Erik’s family that night, smiling at their anecdotes like they can see him. His foot brushes Erik’s one too many times to be accidental, and the cautionary look that garners him is hardly dissuading nor inciting contrition.

Charles is soft at his side when they sit on the couch after dinner, casually flicking through programmes that can’t hold Erik’s attention like Charles does. It almost feels normal; it almost feels natural. Like this is any other Saturday night, and Charles is braving Edie’s teasing and coddling and staying for the evening. It feels like it’s been this way for _years,_ Charles slotting into Erik’s family in a space he never knew needed filling. It’s hard to restrain himself from leaning down and taking his mouth, as if he were allowed to do it, as if they were really dating or really in love. Charles hears him, he knows it, and knows the imploring blue of his eyes. He could kiss him, and Charles would let him. But he can’t let himself.

He’ll never let himself feel that way, and they both know it.

“Is it okay if I stay with you again, tonight?” Charles asks softly at eleven, after Erik’s brushed his teeth and is standing shirtless in his room. He ignores the appreciative look Charles is giving him that he thinks Erik can't see, and despite his best efforts, he relents a small, ‘yes, it’s okay.’

And just like the night before, they slot together, bodies compact against one another, fingers dancing up spines and across ribs and up chests. “Are you cold?” Erik murmurs against his cheek.

“I’m always cold,” remarks Charles softly and sadly. “You just help me forget that.”

“That probably isn’t wise of you.”

Charles tuts. “You’re the one pretending he doesn’t need this, Erik.” 

“You’re the one who thinks getting what he wants won’t hurt everyone around him.”

“So selfless, Erik,” Charles comments dryly. “To feel pain is to be alive. To instigate it is to be human.”

“Look. We’re arguing even now,” Erik titters.

“Go to sleep, Erik,” Charles mutters, permeating an air of irritation and projecting static.

And eventually, Erik does. 

* 

Charles wakes him again in the mid morning, running his fingers through the soft, straggly hair at the nape of his neck with his lips pressed above his eyebrow, the sun warming the room and waking Erik’s inhibitions. Charles lets Erik pretend he thinks he’s still asleep, even though they both know better. Charles will give him this and more, Erik knows. But how long can it last?

He’s not had a lazy morning in weeks, and Erik relishes in it in all the ways he knows he shouldn’t. At some point Charles starts to pepper kisses on his forehead, on his cheekbones, one just under his temple, and maybe Erik sighs, maybe he sneaks his hand under Charles’ shirt, maybe he pulls Charles tight as he can to him, because maybe they got it mixed up and Charles is Erik’s anchor instead. Maybe. It’s easier to pretend he’s asleep and Charles is alive, with his snapped bones and necklace of glass wrapped in cotton and unable to hurt either of them.

Charles breaks the silence between kissing the corner of his eye and kissing the stubble on his cheek. “So are we ever going to talk about this?” he asks gently. “You can’t dream forever.”

And then Erik is awake, pulling away and sitting up on the edge of the bed, staring at the whorls in the floor. “You’re right,” he mutters, the mess of anger and frustration and all-too-familiar guilt settling down on him in lieu of the sleepiness. “We can’t do this anymore, Charles. _I_ can’t do this anymore. It was fun for a day, pretending this is normal. Not anymore.”

On the narrow bed Charles doesn’t have to shift far to come near to Erik, tentatively setting his hand on his shoulder and trying to catch his eyes. “Why can’t we? Just let it go, Erik. You don’t have to punish yourself for imagined grievances.”

Erik tenses, and hisses through his teeth, “It’s not punishment.”

“Then _what_?” Charles presses. “We could be great together.”

And then Erik snaps, the kisses and touches and glances all weighing down on the thin cord of his restraint, pulling it taut til it withers into a single strand of patience. “Stop _trying_ for this! You’re _dead_ , Charles, you- you have to _pass on_. We couldn’t even be together for a month, maybe not even a week, because you’re _already_ slipping- and what would be the point?!”

“The point would be that we got to have each other, for as short a time as it will be. Nothing lasts forever, Erik.” Charles cups Erik’s jaw - hands ice on his burning skin - leans in, eyes flicking over Erik’s mouth; but Erik can’t _do this_ \- and he pushes Charles back and stumbles to the window with a growl.

“This has already gone too far, Charles, and I don’t want this to hurt anymore than it has to, because I- I _won’t come back_ this time.”

Charles frowns from the bed. “What do you mean?”

_It’s not punishment - don’t be selfish - better to ignore him - distracted or heartbroken or both -_

The window pane rattles when Erik slaps his palm on the sill, spinning around to pin a glare on the ghost. It’s stronger than any he ever conjured during class, and his voice cracks, everything he’d kept pushed away spilling out in shouts. “Can’t you tell? Can’t you _read me_? This has gone _too far_ , and when you move on I don’t- I don’t know what will happen. It’ll be like you died a second time.” Desperate and throat tight, Erik’s words come out dangerously strained.

“If it's already gone too far, then what’s the point of holding back now? To save yourself from getting _hurt_? We both know it’s going to happen anyway when I go, Erik,” Charles reasons, voice deep and eyes hard.

“Oh, you can say that, because you’re not the one who’s going to be left here alive and alone,” Erik spits. The bridge of his nose stings. “This can go as far as you want it to, because you’re not going to be the one stuck with all the memories. You’ll see your sister and then you’ll move on, leaving _both_ of us broken again. God, do you ever think of other people, Charles? Did you _ever_ stop to consider the effect you have on everyone around you? You can be so _ignorant_.”

When Charles stands, the bolts rattle in the bed frame and the window creaks dangerously next to Erik. “You think this doesn’t hurt me _now_?” He leers, fingers curling around the cast iron foot of the frame. “I can _see_ how you feel for me, but you won’t stop being so _stubborn_ ; and this has been going on for _years-"_  

“What do you mean years?” Erik bites, knuckles white and teeth grit tight.

Charles laughs, a hollow thing part bewilderment, part exasperation. His hair stands in awry tufts after he drags his fingers through the knots. “So you’re going to continue to play the fool? You know exactly what I’m talking about, Erik - this has been coming for years, this. Us.” When he gestures between them, the anger burning away in Erik’s chest drops down to his gut, coiling and turning to the something like apprehension, something like the yearning he’d folded up and tucked away for all this time.

“What… What are you talking about,” he asks again, but now slower, with caution, and something changes in Charles’ eyes. He flinches when Charles takes an easy step towards him. 

“We’ve always had something between us, Erik,” Charles begins, hands twitching to reach out but kept steady at his sides. “At school. The bickering, the arguments, the sneering; it was never _genuine,_ and I think you know that. I think you know how you’d look at me during gym in junior year, and I know how I’d watch you in English - even up until that Friday. I think you noticed me watching, too.”

“No,” Erik mutters. His mouth is dry and his eyes are glistening with something that’s been quashed for so long. “No,” he tries again. He can't hear Charles say it because then it will be _real_ , and he's been pretending it never was for too long now. “We hated each other. Everyone knew we hated each other; we could never be together for more than five minutes without tearing each other down.” It'd been easier to ignore his feelings for so long, because they could never be reciprocated, because Charles was warm and would never ever feel something for someone as cold as Erik- Charles  _didn't_ feel  _anything_ for him, and that's how it's been, ever since the start, years ago- 

Charles takes another step closer, halfway across the space from him now. “Everyone would whisper how we used our competitive fighting as a facade, covering up some secret between us that in reality we’d never actually bared to each other. They’d say our class debates were _foreplay,_ and that when the bell rang we’d lock ourselves in the old bathroom and have at it. Of course none of it was true; of course it was all gossip that I’d laugh off. But I don’t need to get into your head to know you agree that they were right in part, that there was, is, something between us.”

“I never heard any of that," Erik breathes shakily. “No one ever talks to me at school, _you_ never- you waited until the day you died to ask me-” he can’t finish; can’t look at the soft swell of Charles’ cheeks and crooked line of his nose, can’t get stuck in the perpetual blush of his lips or the sea in his eyes.

“School is nearly over for you, you’ll have your final exams and graduate in a few months. I thought, what was there to lose? You already loathed me anyway, if I came onto you and you despised me for it - well, I was used to your glares. Even if I favoured your softer, throw-away glances,” Charles admits with a slight smile. He looks so small, short and stocky and swimming in the too-big cardigan that Erik chose for him, sleep-creased and rumpled and blood-free like yesterday never happened. The unburnt anger and unused adrenaline in Erik’s blood is stagnant and makes him dizzy - it has to be that. It _has_ to be. 

“I never loathed you, it was something else- I never thought... you couldn't ever feel something for me,” he mutters after a long while filled with rapid breaths and creaking floorboards. “Of course I knew- I knew you were _inclined,_ but why would you flirt with someone like me. All I ever did was argue with you, or shut you down, and all you did was exasperate me.” _In more ways than you could probably know,_ Erik doesn’t say out loud, but Charles no doubt hears him anyway.

“Then let’s just do this,” Charles beseeches. “We’ve both wanted this so long, Erik. _You've_ been wanting this for so long. You can have me now; there’s no point denying ourselves of what’s been a long time coming, especially now in our circumstances.”

The reverie is shattered, the idea tainted by reality. Erik’s voice finally betrays him and cracks when he speaks. After, he hisses through his teeth and glares at the wall. “But that’s just it: this _circumstance_. I’ll feel everything I’ve tried so hard not to for so long, and then you’ll leave me. Can’t you see how that would wreck me?”

"Then tell me," there's a waver on the edges of Charles' voice that does something to Erik's chest, to the incalescent warmth in his belly. "Look me in the eye and tell me truthfully that when I move on, you won't be a wreck anyway. Tell me you're happier now suppressing everything than you would be if you let yourself _feel_ for once." Charles is so close that Erik could hook his arms around his waist and hold him tight and lean down and kiss him, kiss him like he's wanted to since second year. "Tell me we wouldn't be good, for as short as this may be," he whispers, and when where his hands on Erik's shoulders? When were his own hands on Charles' body, solid and _real_ under his palms, his thumbs pressing in the shell of his hips? When was Charles on his toes with his mouth inches from Erik? Yes, _like this,_ just let it happen, like this-- "Tell me we wouldn't be great together..."

And then there's a knock at the bedroom door. "Erik?" His mother calls through the wood. "Are you up? There's a girl here to see you."

For one more bewitching second Erik is lost in his sea blue eyes, and then he pushes him away, turning and shrugging into a shirt and leaving Charles to stand in the middle of the room alone, watching after him. His mother stands aside for him to pass, and Erik storms down the stairs without looking behind him. "She's in the living room," Edie tells him, but he barely hears her between the thrumming of his blood in his ears and the pounding of his heart in his chest. There's something bitter on his tongue that he struggles to swallow.

The only thing that cuts through it all is when he rounds the corner to the living room and sees Raven Xavier seated with her hands folded neat in her lap on the couch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small references to Atonement and Jane Eyre! Woo! I'm not sure if anyone picked up on them, aha.
> 
> The book _'Phantom Fornication: Sexual Encounters with the Supernatural'_ is actually based on a Real Book floating in some small library in Toronto that my beta happened upon. I don't know what the actual title of the book is, or who the author is, but without it this story wouldn't even really exist tbh. The book sort of inspired this whole thing, the idea being that Erik would accidentally bring it home along with an armful of other books on the paranormal from the library in attempt to work out why Charles' spirit is still stuck here, Charles would find it and it'd be an awkward joke until It Wasn't, and 'wait, maybe even though I don't like you but I think you're hot if we have sex then maybe you'll pass on and I'm not suggesting we try it but what do we have to lose and, oh wait, you've had feelings for me for a while now anyway so I mean two birds one stone'.
> 
> This entire fanfic was just meant to be a bit of a joke between me and my beta until it Got Serious, and ergo I just sorta... forgot about that ridiculous ghost sex book... and forgot this was meant to be a ridiculous fic... with no angsty parts or Deep Plot... 
> 
> At some point I'll probably make a short one-shot remix of this fic based on the original idea, with more ridiculous awkward-book-induced, enemies-to-lovers ghost sex and less emotionally crippled erik. ೕ(•̀ᴗ•́)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone for reading!!

Erik’s initial realisation is that he’s still wearing his pyjama pants. Raven seems to notice, too, because she's frowning and looking at the coffee table.

The second thing he realises is that Charles has followed him, and even though Erik's strength is nothing in comparison his fingers still circle Charles’ wrist, holding him in place, holding him silent. It seems to work; that or it's just shock paralysing him. Something protective burns in Erik's chest. He's not sure which of the Xavier siblings it burns for.

"Hi, Erik," Raven starts, dragging her eyes away from where Erik's fingers curl around air. "I was wondering if maybe we could talk somewhere about the message you sent me." 

"Of course," Erik responds cautiously. His mother is standing just shy of the entrance. "Let me just... get dressed. Did you have anywhere in mind?"

Raven looses a breath and steels herself to make eye contact. "The library."

Back in the bedroom neither Erik nor Charles speak: Charles because he can't and Erik because he doesn't know what to say. He dresses with Charles in the room, keeping his eyes always averted and avoiding of the expression on Charles’ face. He knows he needs to say something, ask if he’s okay, _something_ , but the tension is too thick and awkward to manoeuvre through. 

After all, Raven is Charles’ exit from limbo, and now she’s here: the door to peace open and beckoning in the form of his beloved sister. It’s not a moral decision anymore of Erik choosing not to compete with that, to not ask Charles to choose him over his freedom, not ask him to stay. He simply can’t.

Edie is trying to make small talk with Raven at the foot of the stairs, and Erik smiles to ease them both. His mother gives him a quizzical glance as he walks past, swiping his keys from the small table by the door and checking to see Raven is tailing him. He can’t help but look past her at Charles, stuck on the bottom step and staring at him in some mix of incredulous anger and pain, and Erik swallows. “I’ll be home soon,” he tells his mother with a terse smile.

The autumn leaves are soggy underfoot, clustering across the cement pathway out the gate and blown over the frost-burnt grass, stippling brown against even darker brown. Soon it’ll be too slippery to ride, too cold, Erik tries to distract himself. Tries not to think how this is it, how Charles will tie off loose ends with his sister, and then he’ll- “This is me,” Erik tells Raven aimlessly, throwing her a nervous smile over his shoulder. She walks through Charles to step by the passenger side, and horror twists in Erik’s gut and shows on Charles’ face. _Stay with me, Charles,_ he begs ardently, shaking his head slowly when Raven isn’t looking. _We’re so close._

“I- um,” Erik starts. “Hold on a moment.” Raven’s perpetual frown deepens when Erik opens the back door, glares at nothing, and shuts it again.

“Because that didn’t look weird,” Charles mutters sarcastically, sliding into the back of the car. 

 _It would have looked weirder had it opened by itself,_ Erik thinks, feeling hot under Raven’s eyes. She tentatively draws her seatbelt across her chest, never looking away from him, and it makes him want to snap.

“She looks so ill.” Charles is leaning forward, fingers stroking over Raven’s stray tresses and curls of strawberry blonde hair that spill under the headrest. “Ask her how she is.”

“How-” The engine turns over, brought back to life with a disgruntled churning and a disconcerting clank. “How are you?” God, he didn’t think it’d be this hard.

“You haven’t put your seatbelt on,” Raven tells him quietly, and of course, _of course_ she’d pick up on something like that.

“Ah, yeah. Thanks.” She doesn’t answer his question.

Erik can see she’s rolling her words around her mouth, fighting the urge ask, waiting for Erik to tell. It’s like what Charles does, only he’s better at it. 

“She’s right _there_ ,” the ghost titters thinly. “She’s sitting right next to me, and nothing.”

“Stay calm,” Erik warns, and Raven’s icy eyes flick to him under her heavy lashes from the window.

 _Shit shit shit-_ “What?” she demands bluntly, eyes narrowing. "Actually, never mind. I'm sure you'll explain later."

Charles' voice streams through Erik's mind for the remainder of the drive, constant and unrelenting - has she been eating, has she doing okay in school, how is she in general-

 _Those are all things I can't ask her now, unless you want her to jump from the car_ , Erik retorts, eying Charles in the rear view mirror.

"How was the trip here?" he asks instead, trying to ease the silence. 

"Fine. I caught the bus."

Erik wants to know how she knew his home address but he bites his tongue. "You have to, um, hold the door handle up when you shut the- yeah," he tells her after they park in the scarce lot, and Raven quirks her brow in such an Xavier way Erik can't help his mouth twitching into a smile.

Gravel crunches underfoot as they walk up to the library. When Charles takes Raven’s hand as they walk she balks, stiffening for a second before nervously looking at Erik and persevering, easing her face into a neutral state of indifference. Angel eyes him warily as they walk through the lobby, despite Erik's greeting smile, and as they continue down to the study tables the scattering of people all turn their eyes away from their pages to watch him.

There's a table in the corner that's uninhabited, and with skeptical eyes Raven watches Erik slide into a seat, before taking one herself. He waits for her to speak, folding his hands on the desk.

"I don't want some misconstrued version of events," she begins. Charles watches earnestly from the seat beside her. “I want the truth. You can't have known about my cat: I was five and I've never told anyone about her. But here we are.” She breaks off to stare at a shelf, before taking a breath and asking, “Do you know how she died?"

Charles thinks the answer too loudly and too painfully, and slowly, Erik wets his lips and answers quietly, "Cain." 

Raven bristles, knuckles white on the table top, shoulders tight and drawn. "How could you know that." It's hardly a question.

Something sick twists in Erik’s gut that's borne of Charles and the regret of his own prejudice. "You know how. You know I'm telling the truth. Now you just have to believe it."

"You say that like it'll be difficult. But we're in a public space; your work, no less. You can't scream at floors and throw yourself into walls here without losing your job."

"That's why you came," Erik realises coldly. "You know about Friday."

Raven casts a glance around. The straps of her dress fall in the sunken flesh shove her collarbones. "Everyone does. A friend messaged me, said you were smashing the windows and screaming about my brother."

"I'd also lost a perfectly sound school bag," he tries to joke awkwardly. Raven doesn't speak. "But it wasn’t me smashing the windows.”

“Erik,” hisses Charles dangerously. 

“The truth,” Raven reiterates.

“I just need you to believe it.”

Raven’s fingers twitch when Charles closes his hand atop hers. They all notice, and Charles lights up. “Erik, she felt that!”

“What did you have to tell me about my brother?” Raven whispers, dragging her gaze from her steeped fingers to Erik’s face.

“I know how this’ll sound,” Erik starts slowly, eyes sweeping from the nervous twist of Charles’ mouth to the apprehension in Raven’s narrowed eyes. “Believe me, I know.” And then there’s no other way to say it, no other way to stall, he just has to let the words tumble from his mouth with no eloquence or metaphor. “Charles is a ghost. He’s here, with us.”

A burst of laughter claws out of Raven’s throat, abrasive and incredulous. “Charles is a ghost,” she repeats, pushing up from the table and staring Erik down.

“You said you’d believe me. You know I’m telling the truth. He’s standing right there next to you, Raven.” 

“You always were weird,” she only leers, something untrusting breaking behind her eyes. “Charles spoke of you like you hung the moon and the stars with the sun spilling into your words, but we all knew better. You _have_ _no friends_. The only social skill you developed and honed was to lash out at Charles any chance you got, and now, now you just can’t _let him go_! You have this creepy _fantasy_ you continue to beat, dragging everyone in on it even though _we’re trying_ to move on! Charles was never yours to mourn, never yours to lose.” Her breaths are ragged, hands clenched tight in the skirt of her dress with a pained wildness wetting her eyes. She grits her teeth to keep her voice from breaking. “Don’t open this back up. You don’t have the right. Let him die.”

“I already did that,” Erik spits, standing so suddenly the table rocks angrily. “I already did that, and now he’s stuck here and needs you to help him move on, not me. I just have to drag him through this from one checkpoint to the next, giving him my all until he’s sated and gone and I’m left with a chasm that he carved out. But you’re right, Raven, you’re completely right. I _don’t_ have the right to mourn him because I pushed and pushed until he stumbled drunkenly into that car.” Charles’ face is too raw for Erik to look him in the eye, so he looks to Raven instead, whose cheeks are glistening. Erik knows he's crying, too, but everything is surmounting and caving him in, boxing him up and stifling. "For a good while I thought I was going mad; but believe me now when I tell you that this far surpasses insanity, because in all my life I've never been happier than when I'm with your dead brother."

“Erik…” Charles whispers, fingers pushing the tears from his cheeks. “Erik.”

His voice is breaking but he couldn’t care less. Everything’s coming out between his teeth in seethes and spits. People are watching behind their books, judging and whispering and remembering, remembering how the Lehnsherr's boy finally broke and took Xavier’s estranged sister down with him.

“Your brother begged me to take him home from the party that night but I ignored him, and subsequently he died. Charles’ soul never left this realm though, and now he’s stuck with me until he finishes what he has left to do in this world, which is make sure you’re safe and okay. If he doesn’t complete this, he’s going to be stuck here and destroy the town, just like at school; but if he does complete this, he’s going to pass on just as he should and destroy me instead. And that’s it, Raven, that’s all there is: the whole sworn truth and nothing but.” 

Angel is standing in the walkway behind Erik now, he can feel her, but he can’t make himself stop. “Everyone knows Charles and I hated each other. We weren’t friends. So how could I know you owned a cat named Mystique that died at the hands of your older stepbrother? How could I know of your ostracism, or that you were made to stay with your family in the east when Charles died and Kurt banished you?” 

“Stop it!” Raven yells, slamming her fist onto the table, tears dripping onto the chipboard. “Just stop it, Erik!”

“You want to know, too, Raven. You want to know. Charles is right here and I can prove it, but you just have to trust me.”

“Erik, people are _looking.”_ Charles grabs his arm, trying to tug him towards the lobby but Erik stands still, eying Raven.

“He wants us to go. Are you coming?” 

She doesn’t move for a long while, and Erik hears Angel take a step closer to them. Finally, with a nod and a sniff, Raven wipes her hands over her eyes and scoops up her handbag, standing still a moment more to watch Erik and the empty spot next to where his elbow juts. Erik lets Charles lead him out.

"I'd wanted to talk at the library so we'd both be calm," Raven admits stiffly, back in the car. “So we wouldn’t cause a scene, so you couldn’t have another fit like I’d thought you had at school.”

"I know," Erik says pulling out of the carpark, still haughty and pretending Charles isn't staring at him.

"Did I cost you your job? Fighting with you like that?"

Erik laughs. "Half the town already thinks I've lost more than my job." Maybe it’s true. 

Raven goes quiet then, watching the town pass by as Erik drives them to the park. Just as Erik reverses to the curb, she asks, "Is he here?"

"He's in the seat behind you."

She blanches, itching to look at the back seat but keeping her eyes trained on Erik's face. "Can you see him?"

"I can," Erik admits. "We saw a medium. When he died, his soul tied itself to mine. It's usually places that people stick to, houses or somewhere else they felt a strong emotional tie."

"But Charles died on Main Street," Raven finishes for him. "Why did-" Then she looks down at her hands, and Erik already knows what she was going to say. "So he's there?" she asks instead, slowly turning to look behind her at the empty spot Erik can see Charles in.

"I promise he is." Something melts in Erik's voice, earnest and strong yet pained, and he watches Charles in the rear mirror. His hand is in his sister’s hair, pushing it back behind her ears, and Ravens eyes widen when she notices her tresses moving on their own.

"She's beautiful. But she's not been eating," Charles chides.

Erik swallows, looking away from the pain clear as the blue in his eyes back to Raven. "He says you look beautiful, but you need to eat."

“God,” Raven whispers with a choked laugh, shutting her eyes and tilting her cheek into Charles’ cool palm, and Erik can’t look anymore because the moment is too raw. “Why did you leave me, Charles?”

The empty, helpless sense of loss flares up in Erik’s chest in tandem with the pain in Charles. “I wasn’t supposed to die. I wasn’t supposed to die, Raven.”

On the other side of the glass, children are throwing stale bread into the duck pond in the centre of the park, laughing and hanging off their parent’s legs and tumbling into the ocean of burnt orange and brown leaves blanketing in the grass. Under the canopy and privacy of a copse of trees sit a couple Erik averts his eyes from. A woman is lost in her newspaper while a man jogs past and a teen has their nose in their textbooks. Outside, the world keeps turning.

“Tell her about the account,” Charles whispers, stroking Raven’s cheek. 

Erik swallows the lump in his throat. “In order to move on,” he begins, forcing himself to get through this, forcing the words out, “Charles had to set you up and see that you’d be okay. He moved his money into an account for you, one only you can touch. Not Kurt, not Sharon. A key card has been sent to your aunt’s address. The pin is Charles’ birthday.”

The gratitude in Raven’s eyes is as plain as the tears and just has hard to ignore. She doesn't look away from her brother.

“Can you tell me everything, Erik? Everything since a month ago?”

With a look to Charles he acquiesces. They settle at a table that’s strewn with graffiti and riddled with cracks, Raven on Charles’ side and Erik trying to keep his eyes from straying. And then he begins.

*

Raven and Charles talk with Erik as their medium til late past midday, and when Raven realises she's missed her one bus that comes this far out Erik offers to drive her home after texting his mother.

"Thank you," Raven says, and Erik knows it's for more than the lift.

She sits in the backseat with her brother at her side, relating stories from school; idle gossip that Charles had missed and Erik, in his introverted ostracism, never caught. It's not long before she falls asleep with her fingers tangled with Charles’ hands and his head on her shoulder. The radio is a quiet white noise, offering scratchy lullabies to soothe the tumbling of thoughts flowing from Charles to Erik. Erik will pin it on road safety, say he was simply scanning his mirrors like he should, but he finds himself trained on the rear vision and especially Charles in it more times than he’d like to admit.

His legs are tucked up next to him, cardigan swathed and bundled and tucked all around him to keep the fallacy of warmth. On the freeway the only lights that play on his face are from the headlights of other cars, catching in the brown of his hair and making it shine. He’s watching Erik too, with something like longing swelling in the blue of his eyes. His fringe sweeps off his face where he’s pushed at it continuously throughout the day, obscuring nothing. It all looks so normal, so natural; like Charles is _alive_ and Erik’s driving the Xavier siblings home after they broke down somewhere and he happened upon them by some greater universal power, or perhaps they were at a party, and Erik has become Charles’ designated driver ever since that Friday, someone dependable and reliable outside the circles and cliques. 

Or maybe, from that Friday, from a drunken half-date in a twenty-four hour fast food joint at midnight, they’d become something more than an unlikely alliance, become something more than friends, because friends didn’t want to argue with each other then kiss each other and love each other with everything they had.

Charles’ eyes bore into him from the backseat. They could’ve had that and they should have had that, but now it’s too late and there’s no use pining for something that can never be, because it’ll only hurt more.

 _It’s not too late,_ Charles counters.

 _It’s too late for this not to hurt,_ Erik corrects, and something in lights in Charles’ eyes.

Twilight has moseyed into night by the time Erik pulls up to the mansion of a house under the direction of Charles, and Raven stirs.

“Is this the last time I’ll ever be with Charles?” she asks softly.

Erik nods. “He had to see you once more. That’s what was holding him here.” He’s sickly proud of himself for being able to finish that sentence without his voice breaking, but the more he says it the less it sounds like the truth. He thinks Charles knows it never was. 

Raven sighs deeply, staring out over the lawn at her aunt’s house, windows lit up and inviting. She’d told Charles that they were good to her here, being from Brian’s side. Not like before. “As long as you’re happy and safe,” Erik had relayed, word for word.

“At least I get to say goodbye this time,” she breathes now, staring into the space Charles fills.

“Do you have any paper and a pen?” Charles asks of Erik hurriedly, turning from his sister to look at him. Erik hums, clicking open the glove box and rifling through the registration papers and first aid supplies residing there. He finds the back of an old worksheet that’s blank and sufficient, and a biro of which the ink has seeped out and stained the plastic casing, but scribbling on the front of the sheet it works well enough. Erik’s glad - he’s not sure he could repeat whatever Charles needs to say. It’d be too heavy, too personal.

“What’s he doing?” asks Raven warily, watching as Erik puts the paper and pen on the centre console lid and then blinking, before her eyes blow wide as the pen lifts itself and scratches out a message.

“You can message me if you need anything in the future, Raven,” is all Erik says. “I know I was never close with you or your brother. But if there’s anything - I know it’d make Charles happy.”

“And you’ll still remember him, when he’s gone?” Her eyes never leave the pen. 

_Eight thousand dollars - ripping them apart - cleaning the wounds instead of letting them fester - working the ridges of the rift down --_

“I will.” Erik swallows. _I could take care of her,_ he sends through the tether.

 _She needs to learn to live without me,_ is what comes back. _She’s never had to._

The farewell passes quicker than Erik knows Charles and Raven wish it to. In the privacy of Erik’s car Charles floats the note, folded into neat squares, into Raven’s lap. Erik wants to leave, stand outside and stare at the night because it’s all too stifling inside, but that would be unfair to Charles. He’s not sure if the gap in his chest is his own or not as is, and yet he’s keenly aware of Charles’ emotions; a wrong shift could have the ghost falling into the black and taking everything around them with him. 

“My little sister. Be good,” Charles whispers into Raven’s hair, holding her tight with tears spilling down and catching in the red-bitten plush of his lips. “Be safe. I love you.” 

She can’t hear him, but Erik can’t speak.

Raven stands on the doorstep, far from the car but watching none-the-less as Erik pulls from the curb and starts the drive home. In the back seat Charles twists, staring out the window until Raven has left their sight and then some. And then they’re on the freeway, eerily quiet and air cold and empty. 

“Put it on me,” Erik tells him.

“I couldn’t do that,” Charles replies, still in the back and still staring out the windscreen.

“You’re radiating enough negativity as it is. I don’t want you to feel like this.”

“And yet,” wonders Charles quietly. “I don’t feel any different from yesterday, or the day before.”

Erik swallows, clarifying, “In relation to moving on?”

He can feel Charles’ wry smile. “In relation to moving on. Shouldn’t I feel something? Peace? Completion? Emma said the bond would start to fade, and yet-” Erik doesn’t need him to finish his sentence - after all, he _knows._ He’s never felt more connected with Charles than right now, sharing his pain, his loss.

Something sick twists in Erik’s gut, slinking up his throat and threatening to warble his words when he speaks. “We can phone Emma tomorrow and see.”

Charles watches him skeptically for a moment, before blinking and looking out the window. "I suppose. See what she has to say about all this."

"Come sit up here," Erik tells him, inclining his head to the passenger seat, and with a huff Charles clambers through to the front, hand on his shoulder and for one still second with his thighs near Erik's neck. "Are you all right?"

Falling into the passenger seat Charles sighs quietly. "I don't think so. I miss her, Erik. I miss everyone." 

"You know we miss you too." There's a moment where Erik is selfishly glad Charles is stuck to him, that he's the one Charles’ soul bonded with; and then he remembers the pain contorting on Raven’s face and feels sick with himself. 

"Raven would remember me, if I were to come back. She'd help."

"Money," Erik reminds him, and Charles bites his lip.

At some point on the ride back Charles’ legs find themselves in Erik's lap again, and on the freeway when he hardly moves from fifth Erik relents one hand to rest on Charles's ankle, thumb stroking over the sliver of chilled skin between the cuff of his jeans and the elastic of his sock.

The silence is comfortable but stippled with Charles’ sniffling, and Erik lets him cry not because he's unsure how to console but because Charles needs it. Bottling his emotions won't do well for either of them. 

"Is there anywhere you'd like to go?" Erik finally asks when Charles’ tears run dry and they cruise past the welcome to town sign.

"Just home," murmurs Charles, and in between gear changes Erik's fingers still find themselves tracing over the bone in Charles’ ankle.

"That can be done."

The house is silent when they stumble in through the threshold, cold biting at their cheeks, and it surprises Erik because his mother knows to whom Raven is the sister, but then he remembers it's Sunday and his parents are just down the road at the Goldbergs.

"It's so quiet here," Charles wonders, following Erik into the kitchen, voice clear and sharp and fresh from crying. It's only just past eight, and Erik's stomach clenches with hunger, but more prominently he realises how very alone he and Charles are. His parents won't be back til ten at the least.

How much quieter will it be when Charles passes on.

"Do you feel any different now?" Erik asks, blanketing his tone in a casual facade he knows Charles can see through anyway. He leans on the back of a chair, looking anywhere but at the ghost. 

"In regards to moving on?" Charles clarifies slowly, but it comes out more like a prompt, and he slowly steps over near to Erik. "I don't," he replies heavily, looking up at Erik across the table through heavy lashes. 

The hunger in his gut twists to something else; a hope he's disgusted with himself for having. Maybe this means Charles isn't ready to move on, maybe they have more time- "That's peculiar," he tries to say offhandedly, succumbing to the intrigue of the table that Charles is slowly inching around the side of.

All the things Erik can see Charles struggling not to say turns into a simple, "It sure is," and then Charles is at his side, looking up imploringly and impossibly short with his fringe only reaching Erik's neck. Erik can feel the words Charles wants to say slipping into his mind regardless of whether he's intentionally projecting or not - _it's too late, we need this, this was always inevitable_ -

And Erik knows there's no coming back, that this has been climbing for days and weeks, months and years, plateauing into what this is now where he has a second chance to realise all the things he fought so hard not to, a second chance at something perfect-

A week of pain and tension and denial is remedied and rectified with the simple cold brush of Charles’ lips over his own, and for one frozen, immortalised moment all Erik can think of is _wet_.

And then it's okay, because Charles laughs something breathy at him that warms his tongue and his throat and his lungs when he breathes him in, and he's gone- Charles’ hands are clutching the sides of his ribcage, and Erik's running his palms over any part of Charles he can find, trying to find purchase like a drowning man being thrown relentlessly against the rocky shore by waves of something more powerful than he is. One hand is firm on Charles’ neck, fingers splayed over his jaw, tilting his head back so far in order to pull their mouths together he’s sure to get a crick, the other arm wrapped securely around Charles' waist and holding him so uncomfortably tight Erik might think Charles should complain if the only thought coursing mantric through his mind wasn't _finally_.

With one broken, hitched-breath sigh Erik gives in to the tide and lets it drag him in, finding drowning peaceful when it's with Charles’ mouth moving over his own.

Something light and soft eases from Charles' throat, and Erik thinks he might be crying again so he turns his head and kisses him deeper, trying to pry the sadness and agony from him and take it as his own because he never wants Charles to feel less than perfect again. The table jostles when Erik backs Charles into it, overcome with something he didn't know he had hidden within him. Charles is grabbing at his shoulders, running flat palms over his back and sides and face, kissing him wetly, and even though Erik's never done this before, even though the coherent part of his mind is trying to figure out what he's doing, if he’s doing it right, Erik slips his tongue into Charles’ mouth. Charles gasps into him, fingers combing and dragging through Erik's hair. It doesn't matter if it's a little too wet and a little too hard. It's Charles, it's Charles Francis Xavier kissing  _him_ in  _his_ kitchen - it's more than Erik could have ever asked for. 

A stray thought manages to be heard over the blood pounding in Erik's ears: this is the place where Charles came back to him, in the flesh; melting clocks, gushing blood, and all. It's oddly perfect, just in the way this is.

When Erik finally pulls away to catch his breath, Charles kisses up the column of his throat. "I thought you weren't allowed to kiss me," he gasps into his neck, mouthing along the tendons and muscles under his slightly prickly with stubble, slightly clammy with sweat skin.

"Justification is a dangerous slope," is all Erik can say. 

Inexperienced, their kisses are messy, mouths sliding and teeth clashing and tongues laving, but it's a desperate release Erik hadn't known he'd needed so badly. He breaks away only to unwind Charles' scarf from his neck, dropping it in a pile on the table before leaning down to bite the cold, pale flesh that'd been hidden. "Fuck, Erik," Charles gasps, sliding his hands under the other’s jacket and squeezing at the taut muscles in his back and waist. "Fuck."

"You wanted this," Erik growls against the hollow in his throat, snaking his hands under Charles' cardigan and shirt, and he chokes on a breath at the smooth cold skin he finds.

"I still do," Charles gasps. "More than anything. And you?"

Erik hooks his arms under Charles' thighs, moving him from the table to the wall and slamming them both bodily against it, kissing his mouth raw, and it goes without saying. An unprotected _God, he_ is _strong_ filters into their space in Erik's mind and it only serves to spur him further, firing some drive low in his gut that feels different from the guilt or the apprehension or anticipation, somehow evolved into something he's not felt before.

Charles has his fingers coiled tightly in his hair, head arched down to reach Erik’s mouth at this new height difference between them. He makes a noise that gets caught in his throat, shuddering against the wall and crying out when Erik pulls away. He's crying again, for some reason, and when Erik listens he feels Charles flowing into his head - _Raven - Erik - why didn't we have this sooner - I want this so much -_

"We can still have this now, isn't that what you've been saying all this time?" Erik tries to quiet him, brushing the hair back from his eyes and easily pressing kisses to the side of his mouth.

"I know, but now I finally know what it's like to have what I want - I can't bear thinking about letting you go."

A small part of Erik is frustrated, wants to retreat back to how things used to be and snap and say, _I was fine repressing this before you pushed for it, you can’t back out under the pretence of protecting yourself now_ , but it's quieted by the innate need to calm Charles down from the brink and make him happy again. The instinct surprises him.

"Don't think on it. You have me now."

"I just," Charles starts, leaning forward and kissing Erik slowly, tears on his lips making them salty, barely pulling from him when he says, "I think I'm in love with you, Erik. I'm in love with you."

Erik manages to carry Charles out to the hall and by the foot of the stairs before he drops him gently to his feet, and on the bottom step he just comes to height against Erik. His fingers loop in the lapels of Erik's coat, drawing him forward, and he lets Charles kiss him as he wants, lets Charles take what he has wanted for so long now - what they both have. Coats and cardigans tangle in their arms as they slowly climb the stairs, shucking their clothes and shedding their inhibitions until Charles backs Erik against his own bedroom door, grinning against his teeth.

Erik's bedroom floor is appropriated as a wardrobe, and when he pulls his shirt over his head to drop it by the foot of the bed something nervous and cold coils in his belly in lieu of the heat, and he suddenly realises what they're doing. Charles is watching him with heavy eyes, unabashedly gazing down Erik's chest and lingering on the V of his waist and the cut of his abdomen. The insatiable haze for Charles he'd found himself in moments ago dissipates into something else.

"Is this- I don't know if we're- I've not done this before."

Charles smiles at him then, edging forward and taking Erik's hands, bringing them to his chest. "Neither have I. We can figure this out together." He eases Erik's hands down his front to the hem of his shirt, slowly, nodding a small assent and coaxing him to pull it off. His head gets stuck slightly, and when Erik tugs it off completely Charles' hair sticks up in random tufts, and even though his skin is white as snow and freckles stark over his clavicles, he's beautiful, grinning bright and wild with still-wet shimmers glistening in his impossibly blue eyes.

Wind rattles the window in its pane, cool night seeping through the glass, and for all the cold that Charles encompasses Erik makes up for it with blistering heat under his skin and a rapid fire heartbeat. He hisses a tight breath when Charles pulls them flush against one another by his belt loops, mouthing along his strong collar and kissing down his chest as he falls to his knees. The thrill of being so vulnerable in front of Charles, of knowing what they're about to do, makes Erik's blood surge.

"What- Charles, what are you doing?" He asks, something high and frantic in his voice, and Charles only smiles wickedly before fiddling with Erik's belt a moment more.

"This is okay, right?" Charles asks pointedly. "Please honestly tell me if its not; I don't want to find the truth in your mind after it’s done." Regardless, he's working the fly of Erik's jeans and shimmying them down his hips.

"I want this, as long as you do," he says honestly, throat dry and eyes fixed on the sight Charles makes, on his knees in front of him. "You've not done this before?"

Charles hums a moment, struggling to look away from the sizeable bulge in Erik's underwear. "I haven't; but that doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing," he finishes with a smirk, and Erik struggles to breathe. 

"But I thought- you said you'd been with lots of people-"

Charles laughs, rubbing his hands up and down Erik's thighs and tracing behind his knees. "Yeah, on _dates_. I didn't clarify because jealousy looks good on you. I'm sorry. Am I terrible person?"

"Only if you stop now," Erik murmurs, hands cupping the sides of Charles’ face and fingers mussing in his hair. Charles grins, pressing a kiss to the shell of Erik's hipbone and peppering more, down down down, over the waistband of his underwear. The trail ends right on the front of his underpants, and Charles watches him as he kisses in one spot pointedly, over and over. Erik sucks in a breath between his teeth, feeling himself stir, and Charles makes a small delighted noise. 

"You're not yet hard, are you?" he asks inquisitively, rubbing his hands on the sensitive flesh of Erik's inner thighs. He kisses along the ridge Erik's cock makes in his briefs. 

Erik gits his teeth to stop from hissing at the gentle flutter of Charles’ lips. "It won't be long if you keep that up."

"Maybe we should progress, then?" Charles doesn't wait for Erik to answer before he pulls the elastic of his briefs down, and when they snap around Erik's mid thigh it isn't loud enough to cover Charles' gasp. "Fuck, _Erik_."

"What's wrong?" Erik asks hesitantly, eyeing Charles and feeling more than a little self-conscious. 

It takes a moment before Charles can tear his wide eyes away from between Erik’s thighs, and when he does manage to glance up its only for a moment before his eyes flick back down and fix on Erik's cock. "You're _huge._ I- oh my _god_."

He flushes down to his collar. "Is- um. Is that a good thing?" Erik asks nervously, biting his lip and willing himself to keep up his semi.

Charles just grins at him, pressing a kiss to Erik's thigh without breaking eye contact. "I'm not used to circumcision, you'll have to be patient with me," he says in lieu of an answer, and a shiver has just started to trickle down Erik's spine when Charles begins mouthing at him tentatively. 

"Oh, fuck," Erik breathes, stooping over and pushing on Charles’ shoulders. He's only just licking at the head, gently tonguing and sucking on the underside, but it's enough to make Erik clench his eyes shut. It's been so long since he touched himself, since before the accident. Charles' fingers curl around Erik, gently rubbing as he works his lips, and he hums when he takes Erik fully into his mouth. His tongue is oddly chilled like the rest of his body, but it's still wet and tangible and _Charles,_ with his lips split and slowly inching over more and more of Erik's cock.

He's obviously unpractised and a little messy, sometimes sucking too little or bumping his teeth too much, but he's perfect, and even though his lips aren't the sinful shade of red like they used to be, back when his blood was oxygenated and thrumming, it isn't hard for Erik to bring forth that fantasy. Their peers would joke about Charles' mouth for this reason, and Erik would overhear and flush. If he caught himself staring at Charles after that he'd berate himself for the remainder of the day - but now that mouth is wrapped around him, working him with the tight ring of his lips and pulling moans from his chest with every suck and lave.

Erik would have thought maintaining eye contact during something like _this_ would be incredibly, overwhelmingly awkward, but now he can't think of looking anywhere but at Charles, watching him swallow around him. His sea blue eyes flick up to him nervously after he tries to take more of Erik but accidentally chokes instead, muscles tense and unpractised, but Erik just smiles down and says his name breathily, stroking his thumbs over his cheeks. _Am I doing this right?_ Charles asks, and Erik says, “You’re perfect.”

He gently eases Charles off of him, and even though Charles is panting heavily he still whines and tries to take him back in his mouth, arching forward to lick at him and taking whatever else in his palms he can’t reach, stroking him off. He doesn’t mean to think it, it’s not something he’d normally conjure up himself, but the phrase _size queen_ springs itself accidentally into Erik’s mind and their bond, and while Charles laughs lightly all he can do is blush furiously. “You’re just really _big,_ Erik. What are you, seven, seven and a half?” 

 _Oh God-_ “You’re going to make me- if you keep this up I won’t be able to-” 

Charles ignores him, fighting against Erik’s grip and sucking him off hard, relishing in the elongated, throaty moans he draws from Erik. Erik’s just about to relent and let him win when he pulls off, kissing his thigh and rubbing his knees once more. “I know it’s weird,” he starts, “but all I can think about right now is how you managed to hide this during gym.” And that’s all Erik needs to hear before he’s sinking to his own knees in front of Charles, pulling their mouths together hungrily and tasting himself on Charles’ tongue. Kissing is so much _wetter_ than he’d thought it would be, and if he had any sense he’d probably be mildly squeamish about it, but it’s _Charles_ and it’s perfect, better than kissing could be with anyone else. All the messy, devouring kisses he’d seen in movies, with a couple reunited after the greatest separation, or taking each other in their arms in a final goodbye, the desire, the _need_ : it all suddenly, inexplicably makes sense.

He pushes himself onto Charles, tilting him back towards the bed and trying to coax him up onto it. Charles manages to drag his hands from Erik’s hair to under him, pushing himself up onto the edge, and with frantic movements Erik tries to pull his own briefs and jeans down while keeping their mouths rolling over each other. It takes a moment of shifting, broken by breathy laughs and Erik sucking his teeth when Charles’ legs get caught in his pants, but they manage it, and with a relieved and perhaps exaggerated sigh Erik throws the jeans over his shoulder dramatically. When they land across the room Charles laughs gently, leaning him down to kiss him again.

For a fleeting second, when Erik looks between Charles’ pale thighs, he feels a small spike of disappointment to see he isn’t yet hard but it quickly shifts into determination to make him feel good. He isn’t as big as Erik is, but he’s thicker and heavy in Erik's palm, and Erik’s oddly intrigued by the extra skin layered there. Forgoing the teasing he leans forward and opens himself for Charles, taking him in and pulling off with long, slow sucks. His fingers rub firmly in the malleable flesh either side of the shock of brown curls at his groin, and Charles can’t help the broken cry that slips from his chest. He leans over, holding Erik’s head close and tight, knees squeezing against his shoulders, and Erik is filled with a swirling sense of pride and devotion at being able to make Charles crumble like this.

“You feel _so good_ Erik, I- oh, God, _Erik-_ ” he breaks off, panting and keening and canting his hips slightly to get himself further into the wet heat of Erik’s mouth. Erik’s cock twitches in the chilled air at the sounds he’s making. He pulls off to kiss along Charles’ thighs, hooking his knee over his shoulder to suck a mark that quickly vanishes into his skin, but when he glances at Charles’ cock he finds it barely hard at all.

He tries to hide his confusion and disappointment, smiling up at Charles and hoping he hadn’t noticed the slight frown of doubt that'd crossed his brow, but when he flicks his eyes up he knows he has. Charles is biting his lip and staring down at himself, brow dark over his heavy gaze. “I’m sorry- am I, am I not doing it right, or…” Erik’s not sure how to phrase it.

“No, it’s not you, _trust me,_ that was- it’s _not_ you, I… Oh. Oh, stars. Erik.” He hears the realisation seeping into Charles’ voice, but it still hasn’t clicked for him, and just he watches him as he starts to laugh incredulously. “Erik, I’m _dead_. My blood is stagnant. Of course I’m not going to be able to get an erection.”

Even though his knees hurt against the unrelenting hardness of the floorboards, Erik can’t help the bewildered laugh that creeps out of his throat, and he pulls himself up next to Charles on the bed and feels a strange mix of relief and loss. “None of that,” Charles chides, rubbing his thigh and leaning against his shoulder. 

“How are we going to do this, then?”

Charles regards him curiously for a moment, before his mouth forms a small ‘o’ that makes Erik think bad things. “You are a top, right?”

Erik bites his lip. “I don’t know, I never really thought about it. I just… I just thought you’d be the one to, you know. You seem to know more about this than I do.”

"Well, under different circumstances we could've done that, but I can't..." He inclines his head to his lap, and Erik bites his lip.

"I just don't want to hurt you," he admits and Charles leans over to press a kiss on his mouth.

"You won't. Do you trust me?”

He doesn’t need to think on his answer. “More than anything.” 

“We can try something else, then,” Charles suggests with a small smile, and he presses another chaste kiss to Erik’s mouth before coaxing him to lay down, fingers splayed over his chest. “Just lay back.”

His thighs spread over his hips, cool and plush flesh against bone, and Erik tries not to look too obviously at Charles’ body as his sits astride him. _You can look all you want, darling; you don’t have to hold back anymore. I don’t_ want _you to._ “You no longer have to punish yourself for wanting this. No more.”

When Charles reaches a hand behind him and casually takes Erik in his palm, Erik jerks, pushing himself up by his elbows and gritting his teeth against a moan. “No one will hear us; your parents are out. I want to hear you.”

“Shit,” Erik spits as Charles begins to stroke him, broad hand firm and unrelenting. “God, Charles…”

“Do you have any sorbolene or something or other? We could try this without, but I really don’t think…" 

“Bathroom,” Erik hisses when Charles gently rocks against his belly. Charles smirks down at him, climbing off him and relieving the heavy pressure pushing down on the hot coil low in Erik’s gut. While Erik’s eyes are clenched shut Charles can’t help but lean over and quickly take him in his mouth, only sucking for a beat, enough to draw a startled moan from Erik, before hurrying to the bathroom. “You’re going to kill me,” he hears Erik mutter.

Erik listens to Charles rifling through the bathroom cabinet down the hall for a moment before he comes back, naked and beautiful and jutting his hip just so. “I found it,” Charles grins happily, laxing his wrist as he holds the bottle of cream in his hand.

“We have to go slow,” Erik tells him firmly. “I’ve never done this, and it’s been very long time since I’ve… Since I’ve, you know…”

“Since you’ve touched yourself?” Charles asks innocently, crawling back over Erik’s groin, and Erik loses his breath. “Can show me how you do it?”

“Were you always like this?” Erik mutters, pushing himself up by one arm. The other circles around Charles’ waist, pressing into the soft flesh he’ll never get the chance to grow into.

Charles ignores him, shimmying back over to sit on Erik’s thighs. “I was serious, you know,” he says gently, squeezing out a dollop of white, thick cream into his palm. “I want to know how to make you feel good. And it’ll satiate some deep down fantasy I’ve always had of you.”

“You’d fantasize about me?”

“Of course; you’re tall, and brooding, and strong and smart.” Charles rubs the cream over his hands as he speaks, trying futilely to warm the lotion before bringing it to Erik’s heated skin.

Erik bites his lip, hand stroking along Charles’ back. “God, this is just… I never thought that I’d…”

“Make love to me?” Charles supplements for him with a chuckle. “We can stop if you want, you know that.”

“I know, but I just...” Erik’s lips are bitten raw already. “When you move on…”

Charles bends forward and hushes him with a deep kiss, and Erik makes a noise when he feels Charles’ cock pressing flaccid to his abdomen. “We talked about this. If we stop now it’s still going to hurt when I move on, and you know that. At least you’ll have this after I’m gone.” Erik’s mind flits, but Charles cuts him off before he can even open his mouth. “Stop bringing this up if you don’t want it to make you upset. Now, show me how you like it.”

Erik knows he’s trying to bring him back, but that doesn’t change the fact he can see the pain mirrored there in Charles’ eyes. No, Charles is right. If he worries about the future, about the consequences of his actions so much, he’ll never live. So he swallows the perpetual apprehension, the pain he doesn’t yet need to feel, and brings his hand to his cock, gently pumping himself back to fullness. 

Charles’ eyes light up as he watches him, and it spurs something animalistic and powerful in Erik’s chest. Slowly, painfully slowly, Charles brings his slicked hand to Erik’s and mimics his movements, committing to memory every shift and manoeuver, almost studious as he watches Erik with wide, lit eyes. _Like this?_ he wonders, and yes, like that, _just like that,_ and when Erik arches up Charles meets him halfway and steals his breath in a deep kiss, tongue as languid and fluid as his wrist, lips as soft as his skin, and mouth wet and slick and inviting. 

Erik hardly notices Charles’s other hand leaving his chest and positioning behind them, but he feels it down his spine and in his synapses when Charles sinks a slicked finger inside himself. He swallows the gasp that looses from Charles’ chest, kissing up his cheeks and over his eyelids in reverence as he feels through their bond Charles sliding another finger, and then after a moment another, and Erik wants to help, but Charles murmurs an opened-mouthed, shut-eyed _hush, help me like this, yes, just like this,_ and holds his bicep in an almost painfully tight grip--

And then in one swift movement Charles is sinking down over Erik, breathing out a broken moan and taking him in until he sits flush against his waist. Erik might sit up after a moment of seeing stars, take him in his arms and tentatively thrust up as Charles rolls his hips over his own; might take his mouth and his neck and his jaw and anything he can sink his teeth into; might drag his nails down Charles’ back and drink in his moans, but for all he knows this could be a dream because nothing this perfect is ever meant to happen to him. He’s never meant to get this lucky.

They move together in a rhythm that’s shaky and stuttering but one completely their own: Charles and Erik, a dynamic as opposite as north and south but just as powerful, directing and guiding like the points on a compass and shifting the world to their axis. Between kisses and moans, breaths lost to gasps and the composition of airy _I love you’_ s, it isn’t long before Erik is shuddering against Charles’ chest and coming deep and hot inside him, holding him tight as he cries out through his orgasm.

“Keep going, Erik, keep fucking me, fuck me, _fuck me-_ ” he hears Charles urging over the rushing in his ears, and manages to get Charles on his back, hooking his knees over his shoulders and kissing him as he ruts, bottoming out inside him and fucking him hard. Charles doesn’t ejaculate when he comes, it’s an orgasm that runs deeper, something more innate, and he cries out against Erik’s sweaty temple as he shakes apart in Erik’s arms. “I love you,” he breathes. “I love you, Erik.”

As much as Erik wants to lie down and fall asleep in Charles’ arms, they’re sweaty and sticky with lotion and whatever else, so he manages to tug Charles to the shower despite his protests. They stand in the warmth until Erik hears his parents unlock the front door, and giggling and grappling Charles and Erik fall back into bed, after pulling _at least_ briefs on (“Really Charles, what if something were to happen.”). Skin to skin, heat seeps into Charles from where Erik has him tucked up to his chest, warming him in tandem with the thrum of Erik’s conscious. Minds intertwined neither needs to speak, the quiet a heavy blanket lulling over them.

Before Erik goes under, though, he stirs to the overwhelming surge of peaceful completeness that spreads from Charles to him, and then in one drowsy moment Erik figures it out. He figures it all out, and the peace twists to something sick, but it’s fleeting enough for him to still lose the fight with sleep and too weak to bring Charles from his stupor.

Charles is at peace. Charles is finally whole.

It wasn’t seeing Raven one last time, or seeing Jean or his friends. _This_ was what Charles had needed to do, needed to complete. He died without falling in love with Erik, and without Erik falling in love with him in turn, and _now..._

Erik let himself fall, despite his better judgement, despite _everything--_

Charles needs to move on, they’ve both known it from the beginning--

Only now, he’s ready to.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: even after writing and editing this chapter the author still gets sex = love vibes from it, and the author just wants to say she doesn't believe this to be true at all, being asexual herself. I hope no one really reads into it like that; this was meant to be a crack fic at the start as it was ahhh ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	8. Chapter 8

Charles is with him in the morning, eyes shut and mouth slack. His hand is low on Erik's abdomen, making languid circles over his skin. Erik can hear a heartbeat. It takes him a few moments of lazy blinking to realise his head is on Charles' chest, and that the quiet thumping is only his own pulse in his ears.

Then it all comes back. 

Pretending Charles is alive shouldn't hurt like this.

"Morning," Charles slurs into his hair, and Erik has to reel in his thoughts and his upset lest Charles catch on. He can’t ruin this.

He presses a kiss to soft skin under him, somewhere above a nipple and below a pretty collarbone, in reverence with trembling lips. "Good morning. How are you?" Everything is normal. Everything is good.

"Really tired, actually. That's a bit strange." He brings a cool hand up to card through Erik's hair. "Oh, and a little sore," he chuckles. 

"I'm sorry," Erik says a little breathy, because now _that_ is coming back as well. He and Charles Xavier...

"No, it's the good kind. Do you think we have enough time to..." He trails off, walking his fingers down to the waistband of Erik's briefs, and Erik stretches up to kiss him.

Maybe Charles already knows, and he, like Erik, is willingly ignoring it; but Erik's not going to risk it and a distraction is a distraction. Maybe he'll manage to forget, himself, but he doubts it oddly as he moves down to start kissing between Charles’ thighs. 

"We have all the time in the world."

It's a lie.

*

Erik has school. He’s half tempted to skip, but he knows that he’s going to be stared at no matter how much time he takes off.

Erik has school, and while he’s only half tempted to play hooky Charles seems fully intent on keeping him home, dragging him down for kisses and touches as he moves around the room getting ready. He huffs and frowns and gives Charles throwaway glares from the corner of his eye, but they both know when Charles pulls their mouths together in the doorway that Erik is relishing in this, from the way he moves his tongue in Charles’ mouth to the way his fingers interlock with Charles’ own. 

“Wait,” Charles’ says against his kiss-swollen lips. “Wait. You have- Erik, you have _hickeys_.” Charles’ laugh is crystal and full, and he swipes his fingers over Erik’s neck and collar, drawing the marks from his skin.

“When did that even happen?” Erik murmurs lowly, noting the way Charles shivers.   

“I don’t remember,” he replies softly, touching Erik’s jaw even though they both know he doesn’t need to. “But we can’t have you going out like that.”

“You’ll just have to replace them tonight.”

They bike to school, and if Erik uses it as an excuse to feel Charles pressed against his back he doesn’t have to feel guilty for it anymore. By the time he pulls them up to the gates he has soundly and resolutely decided that Charles Xavier is _sin incarnate,_ a verdict strongly influenced by the way Charles had his hands up Erik’s uniform blouse for the duration of the ride, fingers rubbing over his nipples and pinching them flushed. He tucks his erection into the sweater-concealed waistband of his slacks.

Erik finds, however, when he starts walking across the courtyard, that he was right - students and teachers alike stare at him as he walks by, one hand in his pocket with the other lax at his side where Charles is coiled around it. His head knocks against Erik’s shoulder where he leans on him, eyes shut and strides languid. “You aren’t going to sleep on me, are you?” Erik asks, trying to conceal the worry behind something light and joking, but the only reply he gets is a lazy hum.

The Monday assembly has them side by side, with Erik tacking onto the end of his grade and sitting in one of the empty seats in the back. Charles looks around for a moment, gazing out at their class and all its members with something sad in his eyes that Erik doesn't like, and so he casually stretches his arm out invitingly. Charles settles down next to him, leaning against him with his hair tickling Erik's nose every time he inhales, but it's nice, if his accelerated heartbeat and uneven breathing are anything to go by. There's an empty seat set up at the centre of the stage, surrounded by members of the leadership team and the vice captains, as well as Moira, the female captain. "They didn't replace me."

 _How could they,_ Erik thinks.

The assembly folds out and progresses as normally as it would do any Monday. Charles is solid against him, and something mixes tight in Erik's heart. _Love. Pride._

They could have had this, months and years ago. Erik could look at the empty spot on the stage and find Charles smiling back at him, the one in one thousand of the only high school in their small town, eyes only for him. He could have been at Charles' side, holding onto his arm as they walked through corridors to class, could have grinned at him proud and encouraging as he stood at the podium and delivered his speeches.

Moira MacTaggert wears her collar high and begins to talk about the end of year school formal and graduation ceremony. In time with a spike of hurt surfaces the thought of Charles done up in an expensive suit, holding Erik's hand, kissing him in front of their peers unabashedly, dancing with him in the low lights of some rented function hall; sitting next to Charles at the leadership table, forking at some nondescript and expensive prom food, the captain’s hand on his thigh under the tablecloth; laughing with Moira and Sean, Scott, and the vice captains Jean and Lucas; afterwards, in Erik's cheap second-hand hatchback with their breath fogging the windows and Charles' legs around his waist, pants somewhere forgotten on the floor.

Charles is a cold weight against him.

What a stupid fantasy.

The incident on Friday is marked down as a nameless student gone awry, who has been dealt with as procedure goes. Everyone knows the principal is lying through his teeth, but no one will contend it; after all, nobody really knows what happened. No one save for Erik, who’s garnering all sorts of hot glares, he knows. Charles runs his thumb over the bone in his wrist.

“They don’t know what you saved them from, Erik.”

_You’re not something to be afraid of._

Charles sits in the empty space next to him during classes, helping him with his notes and explaining problems and kissing him lightly when no one is looking. They argue, too, like before, unable to meet on the same points or answers. When the bell for lunch rings, Charles gives him a heated look that Erik meets with wild, frustrated eyes, and Charles needn’t even ask.

They fall into a stall in the Creative Arts block bathroom, empty sans their heavy breaths, and Erik throws Charles against the door after locking it, pinning him with his hips and delving into his mouth. The door rattles when Erik falls to his knees, working Charles’ pants open with frantic fingers, and the keen he draws from Charles’ throat when he works Charles into his open mouth almost makes up for everything they’ll never have.

“They were right,” Erik manages to rasp before eagerly taking Charles’ cock back into his mouth, heavy and thick and pleasant against the flat of his tongue. _Our arguments_ are _like foreplay._

Erik hikes him up under his thighs and fucks him against the stall after Charles casts a mental net out and averts the attention of anyone walking by. He comes with Charles whispering in his ear, lips dragging wetly over his cheek, and he hopes Charles doesn’t taste the salt trickling out of his eyes.

In class Charles dozes, sometimes with his head in Erik’s lap, usually just on the table top like it’s the most comfortable place in the world. Erik will idly run his fingers through the light tresses that shift and fall over Charles’ pale cheek, pretending like this is normal, pretending like this isn’t a sign.

Charles rests his chin on Erik’s shoulder as Erik cycles them home, taking the scenic route and meandering around town for a little while. Erik pretends he doesn’t notice Charles gazing out over the cemetery when they pass it, instead reaching a hand back to squeeze at Charles’ leg, tracing up and up until Charles giggles and noses the back of his neck. “I could give you a handjob, right now, and nobody would know,” he whispers, just louder than the wind rushing past.

“You could also not do that,” Erik replies gruffly, tightening his grip on the handlebars. Charles bites his ear.

And that’s how the days fold out before them.

At home, Charles will sit at the dining table, smiling gently as he watches Erik help cook with his parents. They’ll sit and watch television, and Charles will curl up against his side, and it will feel normal, like Charles is only escaping his own family for the night. Like he's alive, and he could laugh along with Edie as she teases her son, talk to his father about economics or politics or history, or just about anything because Charles is so smart and so well versed in everything. He’d help Erik clean up in the kitchen, drying dishes and splashing soapsuds around, kissing him fully while his parents are just over in the next room. 

When Charles and Erik go up to bed, it’s not hard for Erik to pretend his mother gives him a warning look before they ascend the stairs, not hard to pretend he’d go red and Charles would giggle. Charles could show Erik how to dance proper and formal for the prom, years of expensive lessons not gone to waste when Charles takes Erik in his arms and glides them around Erik’s cramped room. And then, maybe, Erik could grin cheekily and rub too close to Charles to be appropriate, could grind a little on him despite the exasperated gasps and looks he’d be drawing from Charles. And then, he could let Charles pin him to the bed and take him, make love to him with his fingers in his mouth to keep him quiet because the walls are thin. Charles owns him heart and soul and body and more, and he’d show it, moving in Erik and making him sigh.

“I love you,” he’d say before coming apart under Charles, and Charles would bite his neck and mark him his, for all the school and town to know.

Erik’s fantasy isn’t far from what happens most nights, but Charles still looks over at him with longing wetting his eyes. “I can teach you how to dance,” he says eagerly, beseechingly, trying to make up for what he can’t give Erik, but Erik just shakes his head and tells him he has homework. A curt dismissal that makes him cold.

Charles touches him as much as he can, remaining in contact almost constantly. Under any other circumstances Erik would have thought it irritating, but he understands, and he’d be lying if he didn’t curl his fingers around Charles in any moment that no one is looking their way. Erik had always thought relationships trivial, inconsistent and weak, leading way to vulnerability. He understands now, how it feels to have someone want you despite whatever darkness lurks under the surface, love you for your flaws and insecurities and everything you are, because to them, it’s all perfect. Everything is perfect. 

Only for them, it’s not. On Thursday morning Charles almost slips, but this time he doesn’t need a trigger. It’s when Erik is getting ready for school, and he’s idling talking about something or other that doesn’t matter now, and then there’s snarling and Charles’ eyes are black, fingers clawing in the wall and shredding the wood, dragging thick chasms through paint and drywall and plaster, empty and dark and hollow. Erik had thrown himself on Charles, just like before, praying Charles wouldn’t kick him up into the door; but then he’d come back, gasping and spluttering and crying, shaking apart in his arms. 

Erik skips school, and he sits with Charles in the shower until the water runs cold and then some time after that, holding him and letting Charles find comfort and reassurance in his mind.

Erik dresses him in his softest pyjamas, swathing him in blankets and bundling him on the lounge like it’ll do anything to warm his dead body. He tells him to choose a movie, trying to get him to think about anything other than the attack, before he slips into the kitchen and rifles through the pantry while trying to ignore his shaking hands.

He brings breakfast he’ll pretend Charles can eat out to the living room, commenting on Charles’ choice of film before curling up against him, fingers intertwined and head on his shoulder. “Erik,” Charles ventures gently, squeezing his fingers. Erik ignores him, so he says his name again, and Erik sighs, pressing his face into Charles’ arm and refusing to open his eyes.

“It’s time, Erik.”

“We don’t know what you need to do here,” Erik lies.

“We have to call Emma.”

Erik shakes his head no, no longer trusting his voice.

“You knew all this time what it was,” Charles says listlessly, carding his fingers through Erik’s hair. He doesn’t sound accusatory.

“I can’t lose you,” Erik pleads through grit teeth. “I can’t lose you, Charles. Not again.”

“We need to call Emma.”

“No, we _don’t_ ,” Erik shouts, voice cracking, and he pulls back to look into Charles’ eyes and cup his face. He holds him too tight. “We can get through the attacks, together; we can get through all of this.” 

Charles could overpower him with a flick of his wrist if he so wished, they both know it, but he lets Erik pin him to the lounge and kiss him fervently, holding him down with his weight over him, like it’ll make him stay. Make this permanent.

He snakes a hand down inside Charles’ too-loose sweatpants, working him even though they both know there’s nothing to be gained. “Tell me everything we could have been,” he hisses, and Charles tells him with ragged breaths how they could have shared a bunk on the school camp in tenth form, tentatively exploring each other’s bodies while the rain made the tin roof sound like it was shattering above them; they could have studied French in the filthiest of ways, revised calculus with wet mouths and tight heat between their legs; Charles could have brought Erik along to all the parties he was invited to, ignoring the frowns and the icy, corner-of-the-eye looks to go get drunk and smoke cigarettes and get high, falling into unused bedrooms and falling into each other, established and bonded and safe.

When Erik’s grandfather died, Charles would have sat next to him on that plane to Germany, rubbing his hand and taking the empty loss from him, sharing that burden. When Charles had to stick his fingers down his mother’s throat because she’d polished off two bottles, one of absinthe one of aspirin, Erik would have been there to drag her to the nearest bathroom, so she could mess all over herself and not the Persian rug in the high-ceilinged, high furnished, high society drawing room.

Charles’ voice is wavering and soft. “You have so much ahead of you. How are you going to move on from this? What’s going to happen to you when I go, Erik?” 

“I’m not letting you go,” Erik tells him, rocking against Charles’ palm with his lips up by his eye. Tells him again, and again, over and over like saying it will make it true. “I’m not letting you go.”

Just after lunch sees them taking a road trip to the neighbouring town an hour north-west, where there’s a big animal sanctuary Erik never got to visit as a child because it is much too far and much too expensive. Erik drives them out, grinning and joking and relishing in Charles’ laughter. The events of the morning are dreamlike, far away and irrelevant now when they’re like this together. They drive with the windows down even though winter has crept upon them and has laced the air with a seam of chill, but Charles delights in it, sitting with his ankles in Erik’s lap. “Can I drive?” he asks when they’re somewhere far along the empty freeway, and Erik huffs, asks, “Have you even got your learner’s permit?” but acquiesces, and climbs over Charles and his light laughter to the passenger seat, prodding him with his booted foot into the driver’s side.

For the last few days Erik wondered what it ever was that made him irritated by Charles. When Charles attempts to drive manual, he remembers.

“It’s your clutch,” Charles complains, every time the car whines and jumps along. Erik’s got his hands braced against the door and the dashboard ready for the inevitable moment where his car shudders back into stillness.

“As the accelerator goes down the clutch comes _up._ It’s _universal,”_ he tells him slowly, through grit teeth. “You’re just a lazy, automatic driver,"

After fifteen minutes Erik sighs in exasperation and crawls back over him into the seat. They didn’t even leave the breakdown lane. “You’ve had your fun, you can cross that off your bucket list,” he says, pointedly looking at Charles as he brings the car into first and merges. “Let’s just get to the zoo.”

“There’s something else on my bucket list we can cross off, too,” Charles says, licking his lips and flashing his teeth in a dirty grin, leaning close to him with his hand on Erik’s thigh. If Erik flushes it’s because the heating has kicked in, that’s all.

“The sanctuary,” he reminds him, broken, futile.

“You’d better keep your eyes on the road, then,” is the last thing Charles says before dipping his head down and working on his fly.

Erik’s fingers clench around the steering wheel.

At the reserve he manages to link his arm inconspicuously enough with Charles’, and they meander around sharing minds. It feels like a date, like an honest, authentic date, one he never got to have when he was younger, and it all makes sense; the teenage drama, the infidelity and crocodile tears and ice cream-remedied heartbreaks. He thinks he understands now, why it's all worth it. Having someone genuinely care, genuinely enjoy you. It’s an experience that occurred so seldom Erik never thought he’d want it, finding comfort in his grades and his studies and homework - all permanent fixtures, independent variables.

Even if Charles was alive there would be a timer on them, but having him close and warm in his mind is exponentially better than anything Erik might have thought he could prefer before. After Charles, he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to go back to the solitude.

 _I used to be so focused on school,_ Erik tells him when they stop for lunch at a small safari-themed cafe situated along one of the walking trails. He should be in his Physics class. _You changed that._

 _You’ll get back into it,_ Charles replies across the booth, chin to palm and elbow to table. _You’re very intelligent. You’ll definitely get valedictorian, with me out of the way._

 _At least I have that to be thankful for._ What an inadequate compensation.

Friday has them sat at Erik’s desk, Charles working through his French with him, even though he took Italian when he was alive. If Erik spends more time watching Charles’ throat move as he talks, or lost in the way his eyes glitter as he skims the text spread out on the table, he doesn’t have to acknowledge it. Charles goes to turn a page with delicate fingers and his hand phases straight through the book. 

He doesn’t acknowledge that, either.

At the library on Saturday, the book Erik passes him falls to the floor with a heavy thud echoing in the quiet, and Armando gives him a closed look. Charles doesn’t stop staring at the floor, even after Erik crouches to hurriedly scoop up the book and its rattled and scattered pages, pretending it didn’t happen, pretending he just missed Charles’ outstretched hand.

“Touch me,” he says, later on in the privacy they find between two shelves. He grabs Charles’ thin wrist, fingers circling around the bone that feels more like a chunk of ice. “ _Touch me,_ so you know it was just a slip up.”

Charles looks up then, sighing shakily, eyes watery, pressing the flats of their palms together and curling his fingers between Erik’s. “You feel that?” Erik hisses, trying, _struggling_ not to pull his hand away against the sharp cold. “You’re fine. You’re fine, Charles.”

Slowly, Charles drags his eyes from their intertwined fingers up to Erik’s, and he needn’t speak, needn’t shake his head no, or send a message to his mind or blink, because Erik _knows,_ inevitably and insufferably, he knows what it is Charles can’t say anymore and he can’t bear to hear.

His other hand comes up to Charles throat, and he pushes him back into the shelf so hard it rattles, books slanting and clattering against the old steel frames. Charles just closes his eyes, tilts his head back, and lets something breathy escape him. Erik untangles their fingers and presses his hand hard against Charles’ sternum, hunkering over him and boxing him in. “If you knew I’d get like this,” he hisses into Charles’ neck, and Charles makes a choking noise loud in his ear. There’s no pulse fluttering underneath his grip; no air to not need. “Why did you let this happen?”

“Because I’m selfish.” He says it clearly, like Erik isn’t closing his trachea, like Erik isn’t trying to hold him in this realm, with his eyes trained on the ceiling. “Because I always get what I want.” His arms, heavy at his sides, slowly come up to hold Erik close, and Charles feels him _finally_ loose a shiver and it makes them both feel sick. “Because you deserve to get what you want.”

“No,” Erik says, and it’s heavy and blunt and edged with something broken. “I didn’t want _this._ ” 

At home, Charles loiters out the front on the curb, and it’s further than he’s meant to be from Erik, than their waning tether has ever allowed. Erik watches him from the living room window until it gets dark, and when Edie asks why he’s going outside at this time in the evening he can’t reply, can’t get the metallic taste of lead off his tongue; can’t fight the empty hollow behind his ribs from sucking his words down into it. 

He sits with Charles on the small damp bench a way down the sidewalk until he loses time, skin no longer sensitive and susceptible to the winter chill coiling in the air. “You’ll get yourself sick,” Charles tells him. It doesn’t warrant a reply.

After all, what could there be to say? I already am? Now I can stand to touch you?

“Go back inside, Erik.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

Stubborn as they are it takes until Charles relents and slumps back into the house for Erik to trail after him, into warmth he doesn’t feel in a house that can’t be home anymore. Charles is in the kitchen, flooding it with blood; Charles is in the living room, pressed to him on the couch; Charles is on the stairs trailing him down to his car, Charles is the shadow in the hallway, the reflections in the glass, and _god_ , Erik’s _room_. Charles is in his bed and at his desk and in his closet, staining everything so Erik won’t have a chance of forgetting.

Everything is swathed in grey. Charles is sitting on the edge of Erik’s bed, staring down at his lap, and when Emma Frost picks up the line after the fifth ring Erik hardly hears what she says, but it’s sugar-laced and careless and vapid. 

And then it’s done. This is all over. Two weeks shattered by a two-minute conversation. Erik’s mobile clatters back onto the desk. Four thick gashes open the wall, letting darkness bleed out. Charles is wearing Erik’s pyjamas again. He doesn’t remember him changing.

“...We have to do something fun,” Charles is telling him weakly, trying to smile, trying to ease, but Erik’s sick of playing pretend. He’s sick of feeling like he should have hope. 

Silently, he stands and shucks his jeans, pulling his work polo over his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor. He comes to the bed, and kneels over Charles’ legs, settling against his knees, and even though the cold of Charles’ hands is biting when they come to Erik’s thighs Erik relishes in it, sinks into being able to _feel_ something again, something stronger than the ache in his bones and the stinging in his eyes, the heaviness in his lungs that almost makes breathing impossible.

This is all he has. This is all he’ll ever have of Charles Xavier, cold and pale and slowly fading. He’ll never know him hot, never know him flushed pink and wild, with freckles stippling his skin that Erik could trace with the point of his tongue; never know him without shadows under his eyes. 

Erik could never ask for more.

His hands come up to Charles’ face, thumbs swiping over the fleshy parts of his lower cheeks, tracing the bow of his lips, the crooked line of his nose. When he kisses him it’s soft, more like a brush of his lips that catches in the cold edges of Charles’ own. Erik holds him there, holds them still and quiet in the chilled room, until Charles pushes forward and takes Erik’s mouth, leaving his mark and tainting every gasped breath to taste of him. Their tether is warm and coiling in Erik’s chest, and Erik lets him in, shivers at the feeling of Charles’ conscience seeping into the darkest niches and folds of his mind. 

“You have to let me go,” Charles is telling him. Erik’s eyes sting, and he presses desperate kisses to Charles’ neck, trying to keep his mouth shut against the sob crawling up his throat. “You don’t need me anymore.”

“That’s a lie,” he manages to rasp. “You know it.”

“You have to move on, Erik, or it’ll destroy you,” Charles tells him again, fingers running up the notches in his spine.

Erik pulls back, holding his jaw tight and open, forcing Charles to meet his eyes. “No,” he seethes, fingers clenching on Charles’ chin. “No, you don’t get to _fucking_ say that. You knew this is how this would end. I _told_ you, you _knew-_ ” 

“I didn’t think you’d be this bad,” Charles snaps, wrenching his head back out of Erik’s grip. 

Erik tries a steady breath through his nose, regarding Charles with a curl to his lip. “Like you didn’t think I’d be in love with you?”

Charles doesn’t speak, and after a minute of silence and intense, frustrated glaring, he breaks contact to stare over Erik’s shoulder. A minute later he lets his forehead fall to his collar. “I’m sorry. Not now. Please don’t do this now.”

Erik wants to fight, wants to turn this anger and pain into something tangible, something he can exert with fists and sharp tongues and crass, hurting words; but then Charles looks back at him, and now there’s something resolute in his gaze, heavy and set and solid. “Do you want dinner?” is all he asks, running his hands up and down over the goose bumps raising the hairs on Erik’s chest.

“I’m not hungry.” He feels too sick. The red marks on Charles’ jaw are slowly fading back into his pale skin.

“Do you want to have sex?”

 _I want you to stay here,_ is what Erik wants to scream, selfishly and unabashed, pained and angry and sinking his claws down.

He knows he can’t say that, though. He knows it would hurt Charles more than anything.

So Charles lets him push him back down onto the mattress and range over him, one hand curled around the bed frame, the other around Charles’ neck, taking out his pain in a different way. Charles sinks into his mind, the warm buzz inside him contrasting against the freezing room, and after a quiet, charged silence where Erik watches his eyes looking for any hint of dissent, Erik leans down and falls into him, just like the first time. It’s wet and it’s rushed, but it’s them, and it’s the only memory Erik will have to tide him through the empty weeks and months that’ll come after tomorrow.

Charles is gasping, hooking his leg over the back of Erik’s thigh and pulling him down to roll up against his crotch. It’s languid and it’s clumsy, but eventually Erik manages to pull Charles’ clothes off and drop them somewhere to the floor, and it doesn’t seem like only two weeks ago that Erik was stuck in a cramped changing cubicle with Charles only tentatively and accidentally brushing against him.

Charles lets his legs fall open around Erik’s hips, and with lazy hands he pulls Erik’s briefs down his thighs. Erik nearly falls off the bed after he kisses down Charles’ chest and settles between his thighs to mouth at him, cramped by the foot of the bed and back arched painfully. Charles laughs breathily, fingers in Erik’s hair, when he wobbles precariously, but it catches and shifts into a quiet moan when Erik’s tongue finds his entrance and opens him wetly.

When Erik pushes inside him he’s a little too tight and a little too dry, Erik’s ministrations and the vaseline (that's found a home in Erik's bedside draw) only working him up so much, but they’re connected and completed and it’s more than Erik could have ever hoped for.

Charles is in his mind and twisting his pleasure, projecting his own into Erik and making his skin feel like electricity. When Charles comes from sharing Erik’s orgasm it makes him choke on his moan and pull their mouths together, teeth clacking and lips red and kiss-sore.  

Erik doesn’t realise he’s crying until Charles pushes his tears back with his thumbs, stroking the cut of his cheekbones with wet eyes and a tired smile. “You were so good. You did so good.”

Afterwards Erik lies next to him, pressing him to the wall and keeping him still in his arms, bodies sweaty and sticking together just shy of unpleasantly.

“Why did we wait so long?” Erik asks him sometime later, after Charles has clicked the lamp off with a wave of his fingers and they’ve pulled the duvet up to their necks.

Charles runs his fingers through Erik’s hair, and it’s soothing and something Erik knows he shouldn’t be addicted to, but it’s too late. “I always fancied you,” he says quietly, unabashed. “You were the one who denied my friendship.”

“You make it sound like my fault,” Erik grouses, but he kisses Charles’ nose absentmindedly. 

“You did always say you hated me so,” Charles titters, giggling when Erik kisses his eye.

“It was never hate, I could never fully delude myself like that, no matter what I thought. It was… Envy, and frustration.”

“Frustration?” Charles repeats, fingers light over the soft muscle of Erik’s waist.

“That I felt how I did about you.”

“But you still feel it now?" 

Erik sighs through his nose. “Oh, yes. Unfortunately, exponentially: yes.”

Nothing more needs to be said. The night slips by them filled only with quiet breaths and rustling fabric. While Erik doesn’t want to sleep, never wants to close his eyes and stop watching Charles’ face or listening to his even, unneeded breathing, Charles’ own drowsiness is leaking through their tether, seeping into Erik’s mind and sending it under. He catches himself dozing several times, waking with a start and a shudder, but Charles only pushes his hair back, over and over, and tells him he needs to sleep. 

“We have a big day tomorrow,” he tells him wetly. “Get some rest. I’ll watch out for you.”

Erik’s mother comes to the his room at ten just to check that he’s okay, but when she opens the door all she finds is her son, on the edge of the bed and coiled around empty space.

Erik dreams of Charles, of them, of could-have-beens and should-have-beens, but come morning he can’t remember any of it.

*

Emma Frost is wearing horned sunglasses, holding an irresponsibly large paper cup of coffee, and leaning against the white hood of her _Mazda 3_  with a black case on the ground next to her white boots when Erik and Charles meet her in front of the town’s motel. It’s nine in the morning. Erik looks back over his shoulder forlornly at his dented and rusty _Ford Festiva_ and hopes she isn’t judging him too harshly from behind her shades. He knows she probably is. At least it has four doors. 

“Good morning, boys,” she says into the crisp air, sipping her coffee. Steam seeps from the lid and wisps around her head in an ethereal halo Erik doesn’t think she deserves at all. Charles manages to keep his laughter internal. “How are we?”

Erik feels like throwing up onto the frost-covered dying grass by the parking lot. He doesn’t voice this. 

“We’ve booked the room, like you asked,” Charles tells her verbally - as well as mentally no doubt - so as to make this seem normal; as normal as this can be.

“Excellent. Your parents think you’re taking a shift at the library today, Erik?” 

Erik hates lying. He hates the feeling lurking in his gut more though. “That’s what I told them.”

“Super.” Frost’s enthusiasm is only making him edgier, angrier, and he doesn’t miss when Charles loops his own arm into the crook of his elbow. “Are you ready to start?”

“What, now?” asks Erik, incredulous and panicked all at once.

“Well, I assume you’ve said your farewells, have you not?” The gratuitous poof of faux fur lining her white coat shifts as she shrugs, and it’s almost imperceptible underneath all her layers. “This is a lengthy process, sugar. If we want this to be done by nightfall we have to start soon.” 

It all feels so disgustingly surreal, so dreamlike, and the light fog blanketing the sleepy town is hardly doing anything to keep Erik from thinking this is all just a terrible, terrible nightmare.

 _It’ll be okay, Erik,_ Charles tells him, squeezing his bicep through his anorak. _This is all going to be okay._

“And what, exactly, is the process?” Erik asks tentatively, defensively. Emma had explained very little on the phone, and all Erik had told her was that Charles was ready to move on. Meeting at the motel and having a room rented out was all the instruction she’d given, and now Erik doesn’t know what to expect.  

Emma kicks off from the bonnet with an exaggerated sigh, heeled boots crunching over the gravel as she makes her way to the room, gloved fingers curled around the handle of the case and number no doubt already plucked from Charles’ mind. “We need to set up an atmosphere. Motels are bland, ugly places, but at least they’re places ghosts hold no emotional attachments to - attachments, which could impede the whole process. Charles would never leave if we did this in your bedroom, Erik,” she leers, casting a knowing glance back over the rims of her glasses. 

“Actually, um-” Charles starts, eyes flicking nervously up to Erik before training on the seams in Emma’s coat. Whatever he’d wanted to say, he doesn’t finish it. At least not verbally. 

Emma stops abruptly, turning to stare at the space Charles fills over her sunglasses for a long moment. Seconds slip past with their white breaths filling the air. Her lips are puckered, and her nostrils flare once before she sucks her teeth and stares out over the scarce parking lot. “Well, _that_ changes things,” she says, almost sourly, and when Erik looks down at Charles for an explanation he has an almost sheepish expression on his face. 

 _What’s going on?_ he thinks loudly in frustration, finding something pleasurable in the way Emma seems to wince a little, nose scrunching for less than a second. However, along with Charles, she ignores him.

Emma’s still for a long moment, before she steps onto the concrete path and heads for the room once more, heels clacking in the quiet. “I’m surprised you were able to scrape together. New plan, boys. You’re going to kill me, Charles Xavier,” is all she says before stopping in front of the door. Erik wants to punch something in frustration, but Charles just squeezes his arm again, trying to keep him from the brink. “Key, please.” The soft waves of her hair shift when she casts an impatient look back at Erik. He pulls the key-ring-token combination from his pocket stiffly.

Cream paint licks up the brick walls inside, speckled with age and questionable marks that Erik doesn’t want to look at too long. The wooden headboard of the double bed is pushed up to the western wall, and it occupies the majority of the space, separating the entrance and another door opposite them, undoubtedly leading to the bathroom. A box TV is against the opposite wall, and a low, scratched coffee table is near the front window, faded red couch next to it. This is it. This is the place he’s going to lose Charles forever.

Emma hums her disappointment with the cheap room. It’s the first thing she’s done that Erik can agree with.

“It could be worse,” Charles tries to say, wrinkling his nose against the musty scent and glancing forlornly at the lacy curtains that could have been white once upon a time.

“I like your optimism, Xavier,” says Emma, hefting her shiny black case onto the table, which rattles and creaks worryingly. “However, I like money even more.”

 _Shit. Shit._ Through everything, after the sobriety of the night before, Erik had forgotten all about payment. “I can run to the ATM,” he stammers, trying not to let a shiver prickle his skin at the look Emma gives him. Charles is biting his lip. “I’ll go get the money out-”

“No,” Charles says suddenly, stepping in front of Erik and digging something crumpled from the pocket of his jeans. “I’m paying.” _The bank account,_ he sends before Erik can ask. 

Erik’s brow knits together as he watches Charles bend and slide the wrinkled cheque over the table, watches Charles eyeing Emma. Her eyebrows are delicate and perfectly arched, and she raises them as she continues to stare into the empty space Charles inhabits over her sunglasses. Erik regards their silent conversation warily until it passes, moments later, and Emma smacks her lips and folds the crumpled paper into something neat before slotting it in her shimmering, sequinned purse; but not before scanning it and making a sound of approval.

“Excellent. We have no time to waste, so before we begin who needs a bathroom break?” Emma sounds far too pleasant for Erik’s liking, and Charles pinches him gently and ushers him to the bathroom, trying to get him to stop him glaring at the back of Emma’s blonde head.

The bathroom is in no less a state of destitute than the room it’s attached to, and Erik’s reflection is streaky and blotched with watermarks. “You need to calm down,” Charles is telling him, hands on his shoulders. A deep line is etched into Erik’s forehead, brow heavy over his hard red eyes. He feels almost too sick to speak.

“I can’t do this,” he says, lips thin, and Charles sighs, glances at the leaking shower in exasperation and then pulls Erik’s chin down to meet his gaze 

“You have to, Erik,” Charles tells him slow and clear. “If we don’t go through with this I’m going to slip further and further until you won’t be able to bring me back, and then it’ll be too late.”

“I can’t do it.” Erik’s voice is barely more than a whisper. His knuckles are white in his grip on the porcelain counter.

“Hey.” Charles smiles, placating and gentle, and squeezes the taut muscle under his cold hands. “We’re going to do this together, yeah? Come on.” He reaches behind him to turn on the faucet, and the pipes groan and creak inside the walls for a precarious second before murky water starts to trickle into the basin and eventually runs clear. He wets his hands and brings them to Erik’s face, washing his cheeks and over his eyes. “Freshen up and meet me outside when you’re ready. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”

Erik swallows the dry lump in his throat, glances at his sallow eyes and sullen cheeks in the mirror and nods shakily. Charles breathes slowly through his nose, rising as tall as he can reach to press a kiss to the side of Erik’s jaw. “We’re going to be all right,” he tells him, before untangling himself and slinking out to join Emma. 

Trust Charles. Everything’s going to be all right. At least if Erik dies today, he’ll know what to expect.

Emma’s opened the black case and started lighting thick candles around the room, all in varying shades and sizes with beads of wax dripping down the sides, Erik finds when he returns. Thin smoke is coiling in the air around a stick of incense, which is set in a thin, painted piece of wood, embedded with various crystals. Emma’s shucked her heavy coat and cast it over the couch, revealing a long, wispy dress that whispers around her pale thin ankles when she walks. Her feet are bare over the carpet and Erik cringes at the hygienity of that _,_ but then he looks at her face and her eyes are filled with black, swirling like liquid and sucking in light. All his prior concerns are quickly quelled.

Charles is sitting on the floral duvet of the bed, which has been covered by some threadbare, patterned throw, knees pressed together with his hands in his lap and looking rather small. He offers a smile to Erik, and he’s trying for the both of them, Erik knows he is, but it holds no hint of the certainty or confidence he’s used to finding in the curve of Charles’ full lips. His arms are bare without the usual brown cardigan to cover them, toned but not as lean as Erik’s own, but every faded freckle they sport Erik commits to memory. Charles pats the other side of the bed, and Erik pretends he doesn’t see his fingers shaking.

His legs feel heavy as lead as he steps slowly across the room, and there’s a nauseous twisting in his stomach that makes his throat constrict. His breaths are loud in his own ears, and there's sweat chipping on his upper lip. He can’t do it; he _doesn’t want to,_ but then his knees hit the side of the old, stiff mattress and Erik knows it’s over. He knows it’s not the incense making his eyes sting.

“On the bed, Erik.” Emma’s voice is distorted, gritty and two-toned and seeping from her closed mouth. She’s rubbed a black paste across her lips, that smears down the sides of her chin and over her jugular veins, disappearing over her collarbones and under her dress in two thick stripes. When Erik looks back at her from the bed, her lips have burnt together, blistered and raw and melted into one another. Apprehension and something else clenches in Erik’s gut and makes his breathing thin and fast, but Charles curls his fingers around Erik’s wrist and tugs him over, too gentle to really shift him but enough to get him to move.

Erik’s not used to this much space between him and Charles when they’re in bed, and he doesn’t care if it’s against Emma’s procedure, he shifts until Charles’ arm is pressed to his side, snaking his hand down his forearm and intertwining their fingers together like normal, like they should be. The façade Charles has worn the entire time finally cracks, then, and he moves into Erik with practised ease. Erik would never want Charles to feel anything other than peace and contentment, but in some small sick way it’s comforting to know that he’s also terrified of what’s going to happen to them, to him. Erik knows how he’ll come out of all this - he’s going to wake up in this motel room and drive back to his house and try to live his life; but what will happen to Charles?

Even though Emma can’t see Charles she must know how Erik holds him, but he couldn’t care less. She comes to the side of the bed holding a jar of burnt red sand, veins black and stark against her thin, pale skin, and Erik tries not to let fear paralyse him; he has to trust Charles, he has to be strong for Charles for once, taking his fear as his own and setting him free. She begins to chant something low and unsettling as she pours the granules in a thick circle around them, an incantation Erik can’t understand and doesn’t particularly want to. She corks the jar once she’s done, tossing it to the floor where she crushes it beneath her bare heel. Black blood seeps from the cuts and into the threads of the carpet.

“Earth, to keep you here, Erik,” she informs him, walking over the glass to the case. “We can’t have your body being sent to the realm of the dead along with Charles’ soul. It’s rather painful, and unfortunately, you would die along the way. Don’t worry, that won’t happen. I’m well practised now.”

Charles’ fingers on his skin are all that’s keeping him sane right now. 

The next jar Emma retrieves is substantially larger, and full of black, writhing _something,_ and she holds the glass over a candle and starts her chanting again. The movement inside the jar grows more frenzied with the heat, Emma’s voice slowly creeping in a crescendo, until the glass shatters and thousands of tiny spiders pour into the flame and skitter down the sides of the table, scurrying along the floor and up onto the bed. Charles looses a panicked noise from his chest, gripping Erik’s arm almost painfully tight, and the spiders crawl up onto the duvet to stop at the edge of the circle. Relief spills from Erik in a sigh into Charles’ neck, and he feels sick from the way his heart thunders in his chest. 

"It's okay," Charles still forces himself to say, shaking and breathy and pressing kisses to Erik's sweaty forehead. "It's going to be okay." His eyes are watery, lips quivering and tight.

The spiders run up Emma's legs and tangle in her hair, which spools across her shoulders loosely. The heavy bangles on her wrists start to flare red, singeing her skin and burning her flesh. When she shifts, sticky tendrils of blood and skin pull away with the metal and make Erik's stomach roll over. His breath is shallow against Charles’ skin. “I can’t. I can’t do this, Charles." 

Charles is about to soothe him before Emma interrupts, huffing and rolling her neck. “If he’s going to be a baby, put him under,” she tells Charles impatiently. Cold sweat pricks at the back of Erik’s neck.

“Erik, please,” Charles starts, carding his fingers through his hair. “Trust me, yeah?”

“Please, Charles,” Erik hisses, and he can’t look at Emma, at the shadows dancing along the walls; can’t look anywhere but that comforting shade of blue, persuading him to _just be calm and trust him._ His charms can’t work on him now though, not here, not in this place between purgatory and hell.

“If you don’t do it, I will,” Emma’s saying, and Erik can feel something sharp in his mind, cold and brisk and not at all the soft swell and flow of Charles’ conscious. 

“Charles-” _we can get up and leave, I can drive us across the country, we don’t have to do this, let’s just run away, we don’t have to do this--_

Charles presses their foreheads together, thumb sweeping over the hair at the nape of Erik’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”

Erik’s voice is broken and dry, throat constricting around his panic. “Charles, please, _please-_ ”

“I’ll find you soon.”

Charles’ voice is hardly a fraction louder than his own, but Erik can feel him in his head; feel the warm pulse behind his eyes and the push at the top of his neck. Warmth spills from his lungs with every breath, flooding bronchioles and filling blood streams, and the lump in his throat smooths. Erik lets out a deep sigh, relishing in the tingle under his skin and the drowsy numbness that creeps its way down his body, dulling that ever-present hollow ache behind his heart into something manageable.

 _I love you, Erik,_ Charles tells him, slinking his hand down and twining their fingers together.

He knows his voice is going to crack and he won’t be able to hold back the sobs, that Emma is right there standing over them, but he doesn’t care anymore; caring is what got him here in the first place. “I love you, Charles.”

Everything is numb, quiet, peaceful: Emma’s voice is distant and insignificant, filtering languidly to him like moonlight through water. It’s cool relief that Erik can’t help falling into, can’t hold back on anymore, not after everything. Drowning in Charles had been like a fight, had been loud yet futile and impossible to be won, it was a burn in his lungs and his heart that warmed him so good even though he knew it would cause irrevocable damage. Charles had changed everything in Erik’s life, warped it all to fit him like a mold that Erik would never be able to break out of. Drowning now only feels like the quiet, resolved end.

_I’ll see you soon._

Erik turns his head to look at Charles, with only seconds left between them, and he burns every pale freckle, every glitter of bright blue in his eyes in his memory, to tide him over for the rest of his life. 

Charles leans forward and kisses him deeply, and Emma’s chanting picks up again and grows louder--

And then everything goes black. 

*

Erik wakes with the seven am shrill chiming of his alarm, phone rattling violently against the side table. The sun is peeking around his drapes, slowly spilling into the room and filling it up with day. There’s a drowsy moment in his head that stills his hand from shutting off the alarm, stills the morning before it tears away from his quickly fading dreams and becomes reality--

And then it passes, and his hand juts out from under his duvet and swipes at the screen of his mobile.

As he dresses for school, pulling the woollen jumper over his blouse and shrugging into the heavy winter blazer, he filters through the schedule for today, cataloguing homework and mulling over his class order. He has work in the afternoon, but it’s only a short shift and he can probably get some study in when it’s quiet. In his closet, there’s a brown cardigan draped over a hanger that he doesn’t remember buying. He stares at it for a few still seconds pensively, and then disregards it. Maybe his mother bought it for him for cheap.

On his desk is a small pile of books he’d never have in his own collection. There’s no label for his library, they’re novels he must have purchased himself at some point, but he just can’t draw on the thought of _why._ A small torn-out page of his notebook is sporting somebody else’s handwriting, and in it reads a cursive _Emma Frost,_ a number, and a location. Should he recognise this name? He stares at it long before shaking himself out of his stupor, scooping his textbooks and open homework into his backpack. Maybe Emma Frost is a tutor, or a branch head the town over, or something or other.

The banister is smooth under his hand as he descends the stairs, which creak underfoot as per their usual fashion. For a second the photo frames on the bookshelf glint and catch his eye, and he stares at the triangle of light splitting into the hall from the kitchen for a long moment, before shaking his head and walking down the hallway. He kisses his mother on the cheek when he steps into the small kitchen, scanning his eyes over the tap, the clock, the table - runner handsome and straight, candelabra barely used - before settling on the plate of _matzah brie_ waiting for him. Edie gives him a look Erik can’t make sense of, so he lets it pass and smiles at her gently.

He bumps into the table accidentally, before he sits, and something makes him still - a sensation, fleeting and thin, that makes his lips tingle and his chest warm. “Erik?” Edie calls - softly and warily, the way she’s been regarding him ever since the accident - from the sink, and he comes back to himself, settling down. Whatever that was, it couldn’t have been a memory - he’s never been kissed.

He flicks through his phone over breakfast, and like every morning, skims the messages in his inbox. They’re underneath the thread with Sean, third from the top, which is comprised of messages begging for shifts to be covered or swapped. The first chat is with Armando, confirming shift times. 

If Erik reads them over like this, daily, meticulously, in penitence, maybe the messages will eventually numb him.

He taps the screen once with a practised thumb, not having to scroll far to reach the top.

_we don’t get along well but youre the most decent person I know  
[23:24]_

_I feel sick please help  
[23:40]_

_whatever. Don’t worry then. Im getting a ride with someone here._  
_Thanks anyway_  
_[23:56]_

His bike leans against one of the flaking wooden supports of the carport, rusty and stiff from the weather. Soon, it’ll be much too cold to bike anywhere, the windchill already bringing tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and flushing his cheeks as he speeds down the roads towards his school. Time is slipping past so quickly. He doesn’t remember where this last month and a half went.

Even if he would allow himself to forget everything, from the messages in his inbox to that last conversation in sixth period English filled with blue eyes and shy smiles, Erik’s high school would dig its heels deep and sink in its claws as far as they could go in order to contradict him. The students milling around the front gate all watch him from their peripherals as he walks his bike to the stands, their gazes heavy and cold and criticising. Everyone must know he ignored those messages. Everyone knows what he did. 

They hated each other, and everyone knows that, too. However, Erik’s not sure he could hate someone enough to let them die.

At least when he has his final exams in two months he’ll go off to university, and all this will be behind him, locked away and tampered down, untouchable and unable to haunt him any longer.

They file into the assembly hall after the bell sounds, ringing and echoing throughout every corner of the school. Erik gets pushed to the back of the line, and tacks on the end of the queue, filling one of the empty seats on the end, one space next to him, on his right. The student representative council is still intent on setting one empty chair next to Moira McTaggert on the stage, out of respect or maybe weakness, because putting it away means accepting, and none of them can do that. There’s a new, expensive bouquet of flowers filling a vase on the marble slab under the plaque on the wall, up at the front and left of the stage. 

Beloved friend and benevolent peer Charles Francis Xavier died three days and six weeks ago and Erik had every opportunity to stop that from happening.

The empty seat on the stage, the empty space in his chest; it’s all Erik’s fault.

He’s a fool to think he could ever let himself forget.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original prompt/idea for the fic: _no omfg can you imagine a fic of this. Like a teen au where Charles and Erik are highschool enemies, but then Charles dies in an accident. Erik feels Horrible until he realises Charles is Fucking Haunting him, that Piece of Shit. Amazing shenanigans happen, and they almost start to become friends when it becomes obvious that it's not good for Charles' soul to be kicking it here in limbo. So sadly but with determination, Erik goes looking for info on ghosts in the library. He sees an Old Book that looks like it has answers but no. It's about literally fucking ghosts, and for some reason (lol ur gay) it seems like a good idea so this fic that may have started out tragic gets Super Ridiculous for a bit until Charles does have to cross over, but yeah they also get to fuck and it is Glorious and Hilarious. Somebody fund this please._ Kind of lacking ridiculous-wise, but I hope I did it justice! 
> 
> This is, to date, the longest fic I've ever completed, and I just want to say a big big thank you to everyone for even reading it, because I really grew quite attached to writing it (even if a lot of it was written while freezing as I waited for the bus to work each day). Title is taken from the BØRNS song [Past Lives](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cux2qJjApGA) which I found on accident one day but I feel really resounds with this fic. Definitely give it a listen, as well as his other songs!


	9. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...surprise! :D

It’s an esteemed and renowned university, one that prides itself on accepting the diversity and supporting the achievements of its student population. Across the county and far from the closed-mindedness of the small rural town he grew up in, even the air here seems different, crisp and new and _fresh._ “It’s a fitting location,” he’d told Raven, when they’d sat perusing campuses on the Internet late into the night. “A fresh start. We can leave everything behind us, all that negativity.” Of course, he hadn’t specified whom he meant by _we,_ but he needn’t: Raven understood fine and had rolled her eyes, sighing at his eagerness and finally relenting and clicking into the university’s homepage.

A month later and seven since the accident, and Raven is sucking her teeth and blowing hair out of her face as she wheels him down the pathways on the first Monday of orientation week, clubs and groups and sororities and fraternities all eagerly thrusting fliers into his lap and trying to sell their causes. By the time they make it to the dorms, he’s got quite a collection tucked under his thighs to keep them from blowing away.

“Just throw them out,” Raven tells him, not bothering to conceal the sour curve to her words.

“They were just trying to be sweet,” he tries to rebut, but she clicks her tongue and scoops the papers into her arms.

“A pamphlet for the track team? _Seriously?_ Someone palmed this off to you? How insensitive can a person be. Ugh, fratboys.” He can’t help but smile at her as she stalks off, brightly coloured slips of paper getting caught in the light breeze and curling in the air to settle on the lawn, which is vibrant and healthy in this late spring. 

“I’m sure they were just trying to be inclusive, dear.”

“Yeah, well,” she grouses when she comes back, casting a wary glance around. “Let’s just get you to the dorms and then we’ll focus on getting you a clique. Won’t take _you_ long, anyway.”

He smiles up at her gently from the chair, and takes her hand where it’s still by her thigh, rubbing the pads of his thumbs over the red polish gleaming on her nails. “I think I can take this from here.” 

Raven looks down at him with an expression she’s never been able to shake, not since Emma Frost dragged him motionless and broken from the backseat of her Mazda to the doorstep of their great Aunt’s mansion. It’s a tight-lipped and closed thing that makes her eyes seem hard and impenetrable, makes her cheekbones a little sharper than normal, and her brow heavier than it should be for a girl her age. He beams up at her warmly now, trying to melt it away.

“You’ve done everything I asked of you and more, my darling sister,” Charles says, kissing her hand and accidentally loosing an impish grin when she huffs and looks out over his head, unable to hold back her own smile. “You helped me get back on my feet – well, figuratively. Emma brought me back to life, but _you_ gave me a life to live.”

Raven’s quiet for a long while. Charles is used to this, though, used to her considering silences. She’d beseeched he never read her, that he let her have this, and of course he could never deny her anything, especially her privacy. He doesn’t mind waiting for her to find her words, not when there’s breath in his lungs and life in his sister; before, six months ago, they’d been devoid of both and watching her in pain had been like dying all over again.

“What if it doesn’t work?” Raven eventually asks, and for a second Charles relishes in being able to count his thundering heartbeats. “What if he doesn’t believe you, or worse, before you even have a chance to convince him he remembers that you’re meant to be _dead._ ”

Ever the optimist, Charles taps his temple and explains, hoping that the reiteration will calm himself more than anything. “I’m thankful Emma was able to leave the telepathy, no matter how much I complain about it. It’s at least good for this.” 

“He might not be so complacent and willing to let you fiddle with his mind,” she says dryly with a quirk to her eyebrow.

“I spent over a month with him. Just like it took until Erik knew things he couldn’t possibly know about our family for you to believe him, to believe I was still here, it might just take some memories of our time together for him to believe it’s really me.”

A heavy sigh fills Raven’s chest. “You’re really set on this, huh?”

“The reason I was stuck here was because I died without falling in love with Erik,” Charles explains, like Raven hasn’t heard it all before a million times. He ignores Raven’s bored groan and dramatic eyerolling. “Obviously, if it was so important for me and Erik to be in love that my soul got stuck in limbo in order to give us more time, we’re meant to be. Written in the stars, predestined, soul mates, what have you. It’ll all work out in the end.”

“God, you’re romantic,” Raven moans. “Do you even remember how much of a dick he was? You’re going to have to make him fall in love with you all over again; are you prepared for that? Is he worth it?”

“If I managed it as a ghost, nothing is impossible now.” Clouds drift lazily in front of the sun for a moment, and in the temporary shadow Charles smiles up at his little sister knowingly. “Have you thought anymore about talking to Hank? Even if only to have him help tutor you while I’m away?”

“Charles,” Raven says, low and warning, shaking her head only slightly. “Even if I- even if I _could,_ I ... Everyone thinks you’re dead. Even I sometimes forget that you’re… that you were gone for so long. I couldn’t keep something like this from him, you were his friend, and yet I couldn’t tell him.”

“Nothing’s impossible, Raven,” Charles says quietly, reiterating and rubbing circles above his sister’s thumb. The sun remerges, lighting up the threads of gold in her hair.

“You should get going.” Raven pulls her hand away, if only to stick it into her handbag and root around for her wallet. She sniffs, gazing out over the young adults all milling on the lawns and under the shade offered by the massive trees. Charles politely looks away from the wet in her eyes. “Here,” she says, unclipping her wallet and digging out a fifty dollar bill. The note Charles wrote all those months ago, on the back of a work sheet with a broken biro on the top of Erik’s console, is tucked neatly next to it, the crease lines worn and fraying slightly. He’d written his plan on it, something he was unable to tell her mentally, something he couldn’t say it out loud.

 _Emma Frost is a woman who can bring me back,_ he’d scrawled messily, hurried and frantic. _Remember her. I’ll need you to help me. Erik can’t know._

Erik had needed to forget, in order to move on; Charles had realised it was the only way, even before Erik had pressed him against the wall in his small kitchen and kissed him deep and longing. He would have gotten stuck in that small town otherwise, mourning his loss for years and years til he withered away to obscurity. At least now he’d followed the plan he’d created years ago, back when Charles was only a pest in his class that made his knuckles white and chest frustratingly tight. Now, Erik had gotten himself into a sound university, a very good one really: this one. Knowing Erik he’d undoubtedly dragged his guilty conscience all the way here with him, but Charles could clean that up neat and tidy and stitch up those old, festering wounds. 

He’d managed to do it once.

“Here,” Raven says, tucking the fifty bill into Charles’ pocket. “Put it in your wallet. Get Erik to take you to the _seven-eleven_ for a donut or something. Go on a date.”

He needn’t thank her, the look he meets her with tender and soft enough. “Are you going to be okay? You can call me anytime, or visit; I’ll shout the airfare.”

“Of course I’ll be fine,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. The wind catches in the gentle waves of her hair and pulls it around her shoulders. “You’re alive; you’re real and you’re here. This isn’t conventional, but it’s more than anything I could have ever asked for.”

“And yet you’re still so sour to Emma,” Charles ventures lightly, fastening his gloves. “Conventional is boring, you should know that by now. One day you’ll warm to her.”

Raven has to bite her lip to keep from spitting something nasty. Charles knows that look. “You only have eight lives left,” she warns jokingly instead. “Don’t want to knock it down to seven.”

“Then you’d better get back to the airport. I’ll be dead from old age soon if you never leave.”

Raven snorts. “Good luck in there, brother. Remember to shave after he remembers you. You don’t want to give him pash-rash.”

Charles laughs convincingly enough that he’s sure he hides his nerves, scratching almost sheepishly at the stubble he wears as a disguise. _I love you, little sister,_ he projects, smooth and gentle and well practised now. Emma taught him well.  

He wheels himself the rest of the way up to the dormitory’s automatic doors, only casting a glance back at Raven over his shoulder once. She gives him two thumbs up and a wild grin, and it does the trick, easing the churning of butterflies in his gut; but only a little.

Charles knows he shouldn’t use his powers with dubious intentions, and when he’d convinced the campus dorm office to give him one specific roommate he saw Emma frowning at him from behind his closed eyes; but this had been worth all her tight lipped and disappointed looks.

He rolls into the lobby, smiling at the young lady behind the front desk and heading for the elevator. His fingers tremble as he depresses the button, and everything just seems so _slow_ now that he’s gotten this far. Erik’s up there, in room 216, probably unpacking his bags with that stoic neutrality carved into his brow and setting his lips into that neat line. Charles’ bags had already been sent up, along with his books and his laptop, all things bought with the trust fund and his inheritance and his own personal account that he’d given to Raven all that time ago. There’d been plenty to spare on tuition, allowing Charles the opportunity to choose anywhere he’d wanted to go. Of course, there could only one place, one that offered scholarships, across the country with an excellent technology department. One that Erik’s had his eye on since junior year. 

Students filter in and out of their rooms, carting bags and boxes and already sporting shadows under their eyes despite it only being first day. They make way for him and his chair in the corridor, and he offers them warm, easy smiles that come so naturally and free. He’ll probably be well acquainted with everyone on his floor. It’s something Erik would have joked about, Charles making friends as easily as breathing. For a second his arms feel too weak with nerves to even grip the metal hoops of the wheels.

Room 216 midway along the hall but it almost seems like it’s not far enough, because within minutes that feel more like seconds which are lost to his heavy breaths and the nerves flittering under his skin, he’s at a door that’s being propped open with some absurdly heavy-looking tome. “Knock knock,” he says, rapping his knuckles lightly on the wood and slowly arching his neck to peer in. There’s a young man with his back to him, all legs and arms with broad shoulders wearing a shirt that does nothing to hide the tight trim of his waist. He’s hefting books from a cardboard box that’s advertising a vacuum on the side, lining them along a bookcase in what Charles doesn’t doubt is the Dewey decimal system.

There’s a sliver of a second where Charles gets to watch Erik like this, with his back to him, movements fluid and graceful; a small moment where he can silently relish in the warmth that trickles down his spine and fills his chest before Erik turns around and gives him a blank but not impolite look. This is Charles’ Erik, as he knew him before, reserved and quiet and strong, always prepared to fight for what’s right, always ready to protect. 

Technically, it’s only been five and a half months since he saw him. It feels like a lifetime.

“Hello,” Erik greets, and even his voice is the same, accent sharpening his words to something low and inviting that makes Charles’ stomach lurch. He tries not to cry, because that would be _really weird_ and he _can’t_ ruin this now, not after so long, not after everything they’ve both gone through to get here.

“Hi,” Charles says, trying to bite back his happiness, trying to keep his telepathy from seeping into the minds of everyone in the building and warming them in tandem. Something quirks over Erik’s face – he mustn’t be doing a very good job of not over-sharing. Excitement floods him for a moment, his breath getting caught in his throat, but he brings himself back and takes a deep, controlled breath through his nose. Erik can’t remember him right now, Emma ripped their minds apart and took all Erik’s memories of Charles as a ghost with her; but they have all the time in the world, and it’s not a lie anymore. “I’m Charles. 216? I think we’re rooming.”

“Um,” Erik starts, blinking a moment and seeming to forget about the thick book weighing on his palms, and _god,_ Charles remembers those hands, remembers that strength. “Yeah, they brought your stuff up already. I can make space on the shelf for you,” he finishes with a nod to the bookcase and a quizzical look. Charles doesn’t miss it; Erik’s conscious flows freely into his mind, like their tether is still there, like they’re still bound to one another – _looks just like him, same name … this is a dream. It can’t be him. It’s impossible._

“Thanks for that,” Charles remedies quickly, before he can stare at Erik too long, lost listening to his thoughts. “You’re a big reader, too? Feel free to help yourself to anything in my collection, though it’s rather… arbitrary, I suppose you’d say.” He grins shyly as he wheels himself in the rest of the way, and the room is surprisingly big, bigger than Erik’s room back at his house. The beds are still single mattresses, though, but Charles is glad. He’s trying not to get ahead of himself but memories of cold nights pressed between chests and duvets and walls come back to him, and when Erik gives him a strange look he prays he hadn’t projected.

“As- as long as you know the Dewey decimal, we shouldn’t have any issues,” Erik jokes. Some things don’t change.

Charles laughs nervously. “Ah, you might have to teach me. I’d never really gotten the hang of it, I’m afraid.”

Erik snorts, baring a grin that holds too many teeth and too much mirth, but it’s Erik, and it makes Charles’ throat tight and his heart beat faster.

This is how it will start. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to hurt, memories buried under months and wishful thinking dragged to the surface in a matter of seconds, but Charles can do it, he knows they can. They’ll be Charles and Erik once more, and everything they were never able to have will be made up for now.

Charles Xavier died in a tragic accident that involved a drunk driver and a pick up truck and the intersection on Main Street in the small country town he was raised in.

Then he fell in love, involving his high school adversary and haunted kitchens and road trips to shady mediums holed away in even shadier clubs. 

And then he came back to life, in a cheap motel room with a floor made of spiders and walls made of shadows. 

It’s going to take time, lots of time and lots of effort, and there will _definitely_ be their perfunctory fighting – Charles can already _hear_ the pounding on the walls from their neighbours and the shouted complaints from their floormates; but Charles is patient. He’d waited years for Erik’s stubbornness to subside, waited day after sleepless day for Erik to realise what this was when their souls had been tied to one another and their minds had been intertwined. It won’t kill Charles to wait a little bit longer.

They’ll fall in love again, and Charles will share his memories and things will be nothing like they were predestined to be, like they should have been if Erik had given him a lift that Friday night, so long ago now; but it will be perfect and whole and complete and _them._ It’ll all work out, Charles _knows_ it has to. He’s come this far.

When Erik offers him another small smile, nods to the boxes on his side of the room, and asks quietly, “Do you need any help unpacking?” that familiar warmth from his voice seeps into Charles and makes him bite his lips. He’d been cold for so long, his dead blood could never surge when Erik flickered his eyes down his body. Now, though, it’s taking all he has to will himself not to blush when Erik unabashedly gazes at him.

“I might need a little help reaching?” he offers with a shy smile, and Erik huffs a breath.

They’re going to be okay. Charles will give him the memories he lost, and Erik will give him the love he’s been without for months. Charles will never be able to see his friends, never see his family again, but he’ll have Erik, who saved him in the most backwards, unconventional way; Erik Lehnsherr, whom he had nothing in common with save for Ms. Munroe’s Advanced English class, a lifetime ago now.

The tail end of a fleeting thought crosses the space between them. _He came back to me._ Erik hastily looks away, confusion weighing on his brow and pulling his bottom lip between his teeth, and Charles’ mouth parts only just to loose a small gasp, his blue eyes wide—

But then Erik turns back to him, confusion dissipated, and nods to the boxes. “I used to work in a library, and while I don’t judge people based on their literary choices, this could make or break a friendship.” Joking – Erik’s joking with him, despite whatever guilt he must still have weighing him down, despite the heartache and loss Charles knows is hollowing out his chest, knows because he’d felt it, too, back at the start, when they’d first been bound.

Charles swallows, eyeing him nervously, but a smile is curving his lips. “Oh dear. How do you feel about cyborg romance?”

Erik lets a steady breath through his nose. “I’m sure we can overlook that.”

Erik doesn’t remember him yet, doesn't remember what they were together, but he will, in time, and it’s all going to work out like it should have done. After everything, all the pain and anger and guilt, they deserve this. It’s been a long time coming, but when it does, it’ll have been worth it all.

What could hinder their love now, after all? Charles had died, and that didn’t stop them. When he feels Erik sneak a shy glance at him over his shoulder as Charles wheels over to the bed, releasing an exaggerated sigh of relief and already falling into the familiarity of the light teases and jokes, he knows that nothing can be impossible for them now.  
  


* * *

 


End file.
